The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [405]
This incomplete creature is immensely powerful and concerned solely with pursuing its own interests, at the expense of everyone else in the world. By showing the `monster' as casting a shadow over a whole community, the unconscious portrays its egotism as the most life-threatening enemy the human race has to face.
We then, however, see how the `dark' figures in every other kind of story also display essentially the same psychological characteristics. The first concern of stories is to show us the nature of this power of egocentricity and what it does to human beings. Naturally, since it is heartlessly self-seeking, it isolates the egotist from everyone around him (except those whose own egotism becomes in some way allied to his). But, equally significantly, we see how an inevitable consequence of egocentricity is that it limits and distorts perception. Someone seeing the world through the ego cannot by definition see objectively. He or she becomes cut off from reality. Seeing only what the ego wishes to see, they fall into a state of delusion. But because such a fantasy-state cannot achieve resolution with reality, this creates an unconscious tendency for the ego to step up its demands, taking on the self-destructive pattern we have seen as the `fantasy spiral'. The egotist is driven ever further into unreality. As we see most obviously mirrored in all the different forms of Tragedy, this puts him increasingly at odds with the world around him, until eventually he is likely to collide with reality in a way which is potentially fatal.
2. Masculine and feminine
By contrast, stories are then concerned to show what is necessary to counter the distorting power of the human ego. The effect of egocentricity is that it disintegrates the psyche, separating subjective consciousness from the objective unconscious. The ego thus becomes identified with what stories portray to us as `masculine' characteristics, most obviously representing a self-centred urge for power and control. In so doing it becomes split off from what stories represent to us as the `feminine' elements in the human psyche. These, combining the capacity to feel sympathetically for others with intuitive understanding, the ability to see objectively and `whole, are rooted in the instinctive unconscious which is essentially selfless.
Hence that fundamental division in stories between the `dark masculine' and the `light feminine', represented by the light heroine. Without the life-giving balance of the selfless values which alone can provide a living connection with other people and with the reality of the world outside it, masculine consciousness must remain cut off and in thrall to the ego. It thus turns into the `monster' and becomes deadly. To counteract the divisive and destructive power of the ego what is needed is a reintegration of the masculine with the feminine.
3. Above the line/below the line
One of the subtlest of the devices the unconscious uses to portray this psychic split is the way it presents to us the little world or `kingdom' of a story divided into two levels: `above the line' and `below the line'. This corresponds to the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious in the human psyche.
On the upper level, the world of the story is dominated by a dark figure (or figures), exercising power and control. His, her or their blinkered egocentricity represents the limited vision of ego-consciousness. It is on the `inferior level', in the shadows cast by the egotism which is dominant on the upper level, that we see those light values of selfless feeling and the ability to see whole which have the potential to bring the upper level back