Where Have All the Stories Gone...
There is a lot of emphasis today in everyone telling their own stories. Writing coaches emphasize the need for authors to put their stories in their books. This draws readers into what the author is saying and gives the author’s message life. These stories can be very compelling.
Indeed, I've written a lot on the place of story between a patient and a physician.
But these stories, as valuable as they are, are anecdotal. The story of one. What’s happened to the cultural stories, the fairy tales which show up in culture after culture.
Stories are embedded with instructions which guide us about the complexities of life.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes…
When I was a child, I clearly remember a time when educators had decided fairy tales were really just too violent for children. Since my own mother was an elementary school teacher, I overhead these discussions. I knew even then that the educators denigrating the violence in fairy tales had missed the boat.
I loved fairy tales and enjoyed reading about them. Around this same time the story of "Beauty and the Beast" was going to be televised and I wanted to see it. Well, was I in for a shock! I found the beast on television was ten times scarier than anything I had imagined. This was also in the earlier days of television, before color, so you may be thinking how scary could this thing have been. Well, scary enough! I wound up turning the set off as soon as the beast appeared.
I knew, though, even as a child, that it wasn’t the story that was the problem. It was some director’s own personal version of beastliness that prompted me to close my mind to it and turn off the set. My own imaginary beast didn’t petrify me and prevent me from enjoying the story.
Bruno Bettelheim’s book The Uses of Enchantment no doubt grew in part out of what he considered this common misunderstanding about fairy tales. Bettelheim noted that certain fairy tale themes exist in almost all cultures and serve a very important sociological purpose. The themes deal with the major fears of childhood such as the loss of a mother or father or separation anxiety. By reading these stories, children squarely confront these basic human predicaments.
In fairy tales, evil is as omnipresent as virtue, just as it is in life, and the duality of this situation requires struggle to solve. Bettelheim notes that all real fairy tales show good triumphing over evil. The love of children for these stories, he says, indicates they address the fears of children they cannot articulate, and therefore are very important to children’s development.
Bettelheim observed long before the social media explosion that the common fairy tale stories are particularly important in our society today:
…children no longer grow up within the security of an extended family, or of a well-integrated community. Therefore, even more than at the times fairy tales were invented, it is important to provide the modern child with images of heroes who have to go out into the world and by themselves and who, although originally ignorant of the ultimate things, find secure places in the world by following their right way with deep inner confidence. (p. 11)
Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run With the Wolves wrote about the need for story from the perspective of women, but her message is similar:
The instruction found in story reassures us that the path has not run out, but still leads women deeper, and more deeply still, into their own knowing. (p. 6) …
The Shift from Storytelling to Novelty
The human brain has many remarkable skills, but one of its most outstanding is its pattern recognition facility. Filed away in memory, stories provide patterns we can use for comparison with our own experience, even when we are not consciously aware of doing this. As Estes says:
Storytelling is bringing up, hauling up; it is not an idle practice. (p. 6)…
As our culture becomes more data-driven than story driven, we lose the stories we used to learn how to address life’s lessons. Instead, our culture shifts our focus to whatever the media thinks will catch our attention. We shift from classic, well-known stories to novelty, leading to a never-ending escalation of whatever can be most shocking. The substance gives way to the show. The guidance disappears with the flash in the pan.
And we are the poorer for it.