The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [407]
All these elements put together represent that state of wholeness which is expressed through the archetypal symbolism of the Self. Such is the archetypal pattern by which the unconscious symbolically shows us how we may restore that unity with our unconscious instinctive programming which first began to split apart with the `Fall'.
To show the restoration of that state of unity is the only way in which the pattern of a story can be fully resolved; and it must do so according to fundamental rules, which insist that such a resolution can only be achieved under specific conditions, when certain ingredients are in place. If they are not, as in those `dark versions' of stories where the story is told from an ego-centred point of view, the story cannot achieve a proper resolution.
But of course stories do not just present us with an idealised picture of how human nature can achieve a reintegrated state. They also provide us with a mirror to all those different states of psychological imbalance which can prevent human beings from reaching that state of wholeness in the first place.
Disintegrated consciousness
The psychic split which distinguishes human beings from other animals is not just a matter of the separation of consciousness from the unconscious. Another consequence of our psychic disintegration is that consciousness itself develops in widely differing ways between one individual and another.
This is why, to a far greater extent than other animals, human beings present such a variety of different personality types. We see some people as having strong personalities, others weak. Some are warm and outgoing, others cold and withdrawn. One person maybe naturally practical and down-to-earth, another cerebral and detached, a third romantic and emotional, a fourth imaginative and spiritual.
One of the more obvious ways in which such variations in psychological makeup can be analysed is in terms of those four psychic functions which we see in stories making up the state of human wholeness. In reality these four functions constitute a hierarchy of different types of consciousness, each of which can be viewed in its own right as a distinct form of perception or intelligence.
At the most basic level is physical consciousness, that which relates us to the world through our senses, through our physical needs and capabilities. It is this which anchors us to practical realities and can give a strong physical presence. Mental intelligence provides our cognitive ability to analyse, calculate and discriminate, and generally to organise our perception of the world through the power of the mind. It is from these two forms of consciousness that we derive those two ingredients essential to the effectiveness of almost every aspect of human life: strength and structure. But to become life-giving these functions need to be balanced by the `feminine' forms of consciousness: the emotional intelligence which gives the capacity for protective and sympathetic feeling; and that imaginative understanding which can look beyond the limitations of sensory and rational perception, to see how things connect up and fit together.5
For animals living in a state of nature these functions are so instinctively integrated with each other that there is no real separation between them. And when human beings first begin to emerge from the state of nature, for a long time this remains true. One of the more obvious characteristics of the world's `primitive' peoples, such as those still at the hunter-gatherer stage of human development, is the extent to which they remain close to the instinctive unity of nature. Although their consciousness is immeasurably more developed than that of animals, the different aspects of