Stephen Larsen - The Mythic Imagination: The Quest for Meaning Through Personal Mythology

THE

MYTHIC

IMAGINATION

The Quest for Meaning
Through Personal Mythology

STEPHEN LARSEN

Inner Traditions International

Rochester, Vermont

The book is dedicated to
Joseph Campbell

Teacher, Guide, and Friend

and to my clients, friends, and relatives
living mythmakers whose images light up
its pages

Acknowledgments

I have dedicated this book to a special and wonderful teacher, Joseph Campbell, and quoted him often in its pages. However, I take full responsibility for my own approach, and the philosophical world view presented herein. I learned much from twenty-three years of study and association with Campbell; but he always encouraged his students not only to follow the creative spirit that pulled us most stronglyour blissbut to think for ourselves. Even more than for his vast knowledge and personal kindness, I thank him for that.

Although myth beckons me always to make pilgrimage to its storied temples and groves, it is in my ongoing work as a psychotherapist that I feel I have done my own deepest explorations. It is precisely the dialogue between myth and psyche that has provided the inspirationand the substancefor this book. I gratefully acknowledge the contribution of my clients, whose luminous words, dreams, and images fill these pages. From Joseph I learned to look for great things in the small, the minutiae of life, and to read images as full of potential meaning; I also learned never to devalue another perspective, person, or tradition. But my clients and students have also been my teachers in a very real way, and I owe them a debt of gratitude. Wounded in life (as we all are) they took the dare of an inner journey with me and my own very human limitations as a guideto find the healing path. In the process they deepened their, and my own, sense of lifes mystery, wonder, and somehow hopefulness.

Now, through giving permission for pieces of their journeysI call them mythogemsto appear in this book, they have empowered a still larger community to deepen and extend their own vision, sense of inquiry into the deep things of life, and hope.

Special thanks are due to my wife, Robin, for her own dreams, drawings, and substantial editing and archival work. My analysis and training with Dr. Edward Whitmont and Dr. Stanislav Grof provided insights of extraordinary depth and importance that subsequently inspired my own therapeutic style.

Barbara Zucker worked long hours on word processors, reading my cryptic notes and helping with details. Roger and Jennifer Woolger, Julie Garrison, and George Dole read my manuscript and provided helpful commentary. Jonathan Fox helped my explorations in psychodrama, and clowning; Arya Maloney and Lucy Barbera helped with pictures, dialogue, and stories about sandplay. William and James Thorpe contributed lore and experience in living mythology. The sapient word processor Nota Beneand our household R2D2salso helped with scholarly detail; and in Leslie Meredith, this book finally managed to find just the editor it wanted.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword

In 1980 I chaired a symposium on personal mythology at the American Psychological Associations annual convention, held in New York City. One of the speakers was Dr. Stephen Larsen, who described how his studies of shamanism had led to his conceptualization of personal mythology, and his use of that concept in education, counseling, and psychotherapy.

Myths have not enjoyed great currency in recent years. The very word is used as a synonym for falsehood. Yet Stephen Larsen realized that mythic narratives are patterns of meaning that state and restate universal human activities. As such, their accounts of creation, conflict, and achievement are metaphors for concerns common to all those who participate in the human adventure.

Cultural myths served several vital purposes. They explained the workings of the world to those bewildered by natural phenomena. They assisted peoples transitions through lifes developmental stages. They helped members of a society find meaning in their social position, economic status, and ethical constraints. They enabled human beings to participate in the mysteries of the cosmos and to worship an entity or process deemed worthy of supreme importance. However, cultural myths became fragmented when science and technology produced dependable ways to understand and control nature; when pluralism seeped into monolithic societies; and when religious doctrine, national laws, and social customs provided frameworksoften sterileby which peoples behavior could be directed.

Yet the deep need for underlying symbols and metaphors remained; personal existence without myth was unsatisfying and stultifying. As a result, myths became personalized, albeit on an unconscious level. Portions of these personal myths surfaced during dreams; reveries; bodily feelings; play; passion; slips of the tongue; ritualistic behavior; and spontaneous music making, dance, writing, drawing, and painting. From these sources one can discern what Larsen calls the psychomythology of everyday life.

The Mythic Imagination is an engrossing account of personal mythmaking that draws on Larsens extensive experience as an educator, counselor, and psychotherapist. He demonstrates how rigid personal myths warp an individuals experience and distort ones perception of the world. Moreover, a paucity of myths in a persons mythology may impair flexibility, openness, and those coping mechanisms that allow behavior to alter as life circumstances change. Larsen points out the shortcomings of those myths held by the cynic as well as the dogmatic believer; neither glimpses the hero with a thousand faces, the myriad of options available to all recipients of humankinds legacy.

STANLEY KRIPPNER, PH.D.

Introduction

THE MYTHIC IMAGINATION

Our Fortunes and Lives seem Chaotic when they are looked at as facts. There is order and meaning only in the great truths believed by everybody in that older wiser time of the world when things were less well known but better understood.

RODERICK MACLEISH

I believe that the mythic revival that is now under way is no mere fad. In modern times myths have been thought of as illusions, but if so, they are the kind that still retain the power, as Joseph Campbell put it, to carry the human spirit forward. Psychologist Jean Houston identified myth as the cognitive and emotional DNA of the psychesomehow ever new, always generative, yet as old as the hills that hide the ancient secrets of our race.

The fresh and open mind of the child creates and understands myths intuitively, whereas the psychotherapist, the creative writer, and the scholar labor long to mine myths rich veins of wisdom and creative inspiration. Yet even now, mythology emerges as the legacy of a whole planet. To understand other people and other cultures and the images we shareand fail to sharewith our fellows, we must relearn an aboriginal language: the universal tongue of the human imagination. With its inexhaustible vocabulary of symbol and story, it is at once our ancestral birthright and the ever-brimming well of dreams into which we look to find our future. I call this innate resource of ours the mythic imagination.