What Are the Themes of Your Story?

As strange as it often seems to people, there are many ways that my work as a professor of Comparative Literature and my work as a psychoanalyst coincide and inform one another. I encountered one of those places of meeting recently when I asked the students in my Introduction to World Mythology class to write a paper about a myth or myths that are central to their own personal stories.

Each of us has a story that we have created about who we are and about what we hold dear. Our beliefs and our interactions with the world and the connections with  people in our lives are profoundly influenced by that narrative. At the same time, those beliefs are quite often left unspoken. Sometimes, they aren’t even really thought. They are, as Freud recognized, unconscious. That means that ideas and ideals that we hold most closely and that deeply affect the way we think about ourselves in the world can remain unknown to us. They are like ghost-writers of our internal stories.

When I gave this assignment, my students were a bit baffled, I have to admit. Because we often think of “myths” as stories involving Greek gods or vengeful spirits, my students paused when they were asked to think about stories they use to explain their worlds. Isn’t the way we deal with the world simply “reality”? Well… yes. But at the same time, we don’t always experience the same reality. Or we can share an experience, both agree about what happened, but understand that experience differently. What accounts for that difference? The way we understand experience is deeply affected by the way our internal stories, our personal mythos, ground, organize, and narrate our external experience.

As a professor, I asked my students to think about the way they are potentially literary individuals without being aware of it. As an analyst, I help patients articulate their stories, speak about them, and think about how those internal narratives influence their external and internal experiences. By looking at how we tell the stories of our past we can begin to think about and understand the way we tell the stories of our present. This is one important way to think of transference. The work of the therapy process involves opening up those internal stories and offering new ways of understanding and making meaning of them.

Psychotherapy cannot change what has happened in the past. It can, however, uncover the beliefs that shape the way we think about and make meaning of the past. And working together, the analyst and the analysand find a way forward by thinking about that past differently, less painfully, less critically, and more consciously, so that the future presents the possibility of a better story.