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By Root 5512 0

the true essence of which lies within. Certainly Hitler and his Nazi followers had been a supreme embodiment of everything the archetypal `monster' represents.6 But ultimately the archetype, as we see it expressed in stories, stands not for the overcoming of any specific external monster. It runs much deeper than that, as an expression of the human need to overcome the very principle of egotism, as this operates in every one of us. In this sense, we are reminded that the real purpose of these great archetypes in storytelling is not to describe what happens in the outside world, but to show us the patterns which shape what goes on within, in that inner psychic realm from which all our behaviour in the outside world originates. It is this which explains why we so often get the impression that what happens in stories is quite different from what happens in real life: because we are looking in the wrong place for what stories really represent. This does not mean that these great archetypal patterns embedded in our unconscious do not influence how we view the outside world. They do so in countless ways all the time. But the most obvious means whereby they do so lies in how we project them outwardly onto the world, in a manner which misses their true inner purpose. And it is this which inevitably leads to frustration, when they seem never quite to fulfil the expectations we have placed on them: leading us to suppose that what only happens in `a story' and what happens in `real life' are two quite different things.

Projections and disappointments

In 1336 the Italian poet Petrarch and his brother climbed to the summit of Mont Ventoux in Provence. Doubtless many people, shepherds and others, had ascended mountains before. But this was the first occasion in history when the climbers were sufficently self-conscious about what they were doing to record the event. Since then, and particularly in the last two centuries, climbing to the tops of mountains such as Everest, `because they are there', has become a commonplace. But it is a uniquely human thing to want to do. Animals feel no urge to reach the tops of mountains except in pursuit of food, and the question arises `why do human beings do it?' Why should they wish to make long, arduous journeys, often risking death, to reach such arbitrary points on our Earth's surface as the North and South Poles? Clearly there is a parallel between the obsessive human desire to achieve such purely symbolic physical goals and that overwhelming sense of compulsion to achieve a single, central purpose we see evoked by the archetype of the Quest. It is no accident that, when we read an account of some expedition to conquer Everest, land on the Moon or reach any other physical goal hard to attain, the story should draw us on in precisely the same way as a fictional Quest, because both are rooted in the same archetype.

The reason why our unconscious has been coded with this pattern, preconditioning us to this sense that somewhere there is a goal of immense significance which will require a long and difficult journey to reach is that it relates to our inner psychological development. The goal on which the Quest archetype is centred symbolises the state of psychic `wholeness. As with any other archetype, however, it can also be projected onto the outer world. Even though those who set out to climb Everest or reach the North Pole may derive immense personal satisfaction from achieving their goal, they have not reached that ego-transcending inner goal with which the pattern coded into our unconscious is really concerned. What has happened is that their ego has become identified with a pattern which actually originates in the drive to reach an internal goal and projected it externally. And herein lies the clue to the most obvious way in which most of the archetypal patterns of storytelling unconsciously influence our lives and thinking in the `real world'.

In fact the only archetypal pattern which directly shapes events in the real world in precisely the sense the archetype intends is that of Tragedy.