EVERY STORY IS THREE: THE UNFOLDING NARRATIVE YOU SEE, HEAR OR IMAGINE, THE WAY THE MEDIUM OR TELLER TELLS IT, WHAT IT TELLS YOU ABOUT YOU.

Let me tell you a story.

It happens every time someone tells a story. The story teller's voice and gestures capture our attention. The room darkens and the screen lights up. We open the book to page one. Once upon a time. Long ago and far away. Or in this city right now. There are characters. One is like me. One may be like you. Their environment is familiar or strange. It’s calm and quiet or it’s chaotic.

Something about the characters

grabs our attention. The way they look or speak. Something about their situation is intriguing. There is a problem to be solved or a goal to be attained. Something to chase after or run from. Something to love or fear. We care about a character. We wonder how they will solve the problem or achieve the objective, or why they will fail.

Things happen to them. They talk to each other and take action. The story teller speaks as if she knows everything that will happen. Or we see the story through the eyes and mind of one character. Or from a distance, and then close. Other characters come and go and interact with each other. We learn more about their past, their motives, their hopes and fears. We think we know what will happen but then it doesn’t. We hear the thoughts of one character. The expression on the face of another is mysterious. The characters do things we don’t understand, but then they are explained. We see and understand things the characters don’t know. Don’t open that door. Don’t believe what that person just said.

The story unfolds along a deliberate straight path, or it is complicated with many twists and turns. That was a flashback. The character remembering his past. This is the character’s dream or a fantasy about what she imagines. There are breaks in the story. Whatever was left out doesn’t seem to matter. But then it does. Something incongruous happens. Then later it’s explained. Sudden surprises are hilariously funny or terrifying.

The storyteller speaks in the characters’ voices, her hands mimic the characters’ moves. The camera lets us see the action from different points of view. The sounds make the environment seem present and real. Music gives an emotional color, forecasts something scary or punctuates a sudden change. The words on the page are so vivid we imagine the light, or dampness, or smell of the place.

The characters seem powerful and dynamic or they seem trapped in a world they can’t control. Or they are doofuses doing nutty things in goofy situations.

Tension rises and falls. We feel the end of the story is coming. There have been many clues. We fear for the worst or hope for the best. We expect a happy ending but we can’t imagine what it will be. Will honesty and generosity be rewarded or will the killer get away with it?

The end is satisfying or infuriating. We have learned something about the human condition or the storyteller has cheated us. The end we expected happened but then it wasn’t the end and now there’s one more twist. Or in the middle of a scene it just stops and we’ll never get the resolution we expect. Or there is a gradual explanation, trailing off, tying up all the loose ends, riding off into the sunset, together or alone.

There are classic fables like the tortoise and the hare. There are historical moral tales like the Titanic. There are mythical images like the rail splitter or the blind and deaf girl. There are ballads and rap songs. Sequences of pictures on the comics page and drawings of bulls on the walls of caves. There are myths and memories that trail off into a fog. Was King Tut a real person? Did George Washington really cut down that tree? Where were we living when gramma died?

Over the last decade or so, popular culture seems even more obsessed with stories. The news is framed as a collection of stories, from the breaking crime drama or environmental disaster, to the actress’s arrest or the cute puppies tipping over the cardboard box. NPR has their Story Corps, which goes around the country taping and then editing thousands of personal vignettes from real people's lives, more stories than any one of us could ever absorb.

To the point that stories have begun to lose some of their inherent value. When a million new photos pop up on the web every day, the story goes, it’s harder to believe in the importance of any one image. When everyone has a unique and vital story to tell, every other story is a little less interesting. Not always true. But a trend that is troubling. It gets harder and harder to sift through the stories and know which ones are really important, worth remembering, with a morale or poignant point, and which are merely distractions and diversions ... from other stories.

TV and the web create a mash-up.

Sometimes on purpose. Often by accident. Or as a result of our channel or site surfing.

TV news stands out as an inherent contradiction. It is both the purveyor of the stories that really do matter, and a force that cannot help but distort. By transforming critical information about real life in the real world into “stories,” it over-simplifies and stereotypes, edits and interprets, slants and moralizes in a shamelessly manipulative manner. It may or may not give us relevant "facts," but it spins it to make it entertaining. News stories don’t begin when the cameras get there. They don’t end with the titles and music or the commercial. They don’t always mean what the newscasters tell us they mean. Serious stories at the top. If it bleeds it leads. Sports, weather and happy stories at the end. Leave us smiling, maybe.

Beyond the simplification and distortion in any one story, there are endless choppy transitions. The end of “The Donner Party” is followed immediately by a Lexus on “a road less travelled.” Usually with much less accidental meaning, but with more of an unconscious world view. The news, the dramas, the sitcoms and game shows, the ads that scare us and tease us and whet our appetites, the popups and animations, all tumble in a sequence that seems to mean they are all of equal value, all part of a very confusing story of the world.

It is ever more difficult to sift and prioritize, interpret and remember what matters. The most important information about the world, real, fictional and metaphorical, may not be translatable into one story, several or a million stories. Stories can give us broad and deep insights into ourselves and the world. But there are subtle aspects and qualities of our lives that cannot be conveyed by a story and should not be expected to.

In almost any story, the tensions that energize it and the hooks that hold our attention give us clues to the structure of the unconscious mind.

The tensions are about the love and power the characters want, the need, desire and fear they feel. We are hooked by the friction between what our characters know, and what we know about them. We like stories because we expect them to tell us about ourselves. Our curiosity is engaged by layers of unknowns. What will happen next? How will it come out? What will it mean? What will it tell me about me?

The story about stories can tell us things about our invisible selves, our irrational motives, our brilliant minds and our foolishness, our greed and generosity, our self-deception and denial. Understanding stuff about the unconscious also provides insight into politics, media in general, advertising in particular, economics, war and into this absolutely unprecedented moment in human history.

Stories give us one window into the unconscious, if we care to look. There are other windows. But the point of the story ... yes I’m giving away the ending ... is that the unconscious mind is vastly more powerful in our individual lives and in our shared culture than we understand or are likely to admit.

Unless we begin to bring the unconscious out into the light, admit its power and learn to temper it, we as a species are more likely to end up in a tragedy than a happy ending.

Intermission

 

THE STRUCTURE AND ENERGY IN STORIES TELL US A LOT ABOUT THE UNCONSCIOUS. SEX + VIOLENCE, LOVE + POWER. WHY DO WE CARE? AND STAY TO THE END?

Sexual imagery is an analog ...

for our need for love. Scenes of violence and destruction are analogs for our need for power. Images of beauty and wealth stimulate desire. Poverty and pain trigger fear. The forces of sex and violence, desire and fear are exaggerated and distorted in our culture because they give overt release to the unconscious forces that have no other avenue of expression. Ignoring their influence will not lessen it. The opposite is in fact true. We will only separate fact from fiction in our expressions of love and sex and violence and power when we understand their unconscious sources.

Mickey Spillane,

one of the most popular crime novelists, said, “Violence will always outsell sex, and the two together will outsell everything else.” But book sales are not the point.

THE REPTILE BRAIN

Cut to the chase.

Or the fight scene. These are analogs of innate reactions rooted in our reptile brains. Reptiles didn’t fear much, at least the ones that survived. But neuro-physiologists ... brain scientists ... can trace the fight or flight reaction to the most primitive parts of our brains, clear, present, living remnants of our deep evolutionary past.

Just as conflict drives the narrative, the unconscious is fraught with conflict. If we think of the unconscious mind as the “mind of the body” ... the mind speaking through the body in pre-verbal urges, then the evolutionary order of the forces may give us insight into the dynamic relationships of the unconscious mind.

The storyteller draws pictures in the air.

Her hands reach down as if into a mucky swamp. The storyteller says that the unconscious mind is structured from the bottom up. We can imagine gooey slime and slithery worms oozing between her fingers. The bottom layer is the most primitive, powerful and problematic because we don’t understand how deep and how far back it goes. And because we haven’t a clue how much it affects everything we think and do.

Call it the FEAR POWER NEXUS.

The need for power and the fear of losing it. Feel power and fight or chase. Feel fear and flee. Want food, chase it and eat. Basic. Primitive. Survival instinct. Part of all of us. Sneaks up and tweaks our emotions and bends our behavior. To our peril to the degree we ignore it’s roots. A paradox. Fears become self-fulfilling when they seem real but are not.

Call it the life force or the fear

of death. The worst feeling is helplessness, powerlessness. Our most basic need is to have power, over our bodies, our health, our well being. Inversely, when threatened, our impulse is to run away or strike out, to use physical power. Anger is an expression of the need to control. The most direct and spontaneous expression of the need for power is the impulse to destroy ... anything in our path, sometimes anything within reach.

We’ve experienced or observed enemy attacks on U.S. soil. We are alarmed at a perceived ongoing threat. Hurricanes and earthquakes remind us that nature is in charge and doesn’t care if she scares us, washes us out to sea, or crushes us in our own crappy buildings.

We see that politicians are all too willing to use fear to manipulate us. They hire expert mind-control pitchmen to sneak scary buzz words and images into ads that tell us to buy the drug or car or dress, or to vote for the man or woman who will alleviate the fears they exaggerate or invent.

THE MAMMAL BRAIN

The next clue:

What’s the difference, evolutionarily, between reptiles and mammals? Isn’t it obvious? The eggs are kept inside. And there are breasts waiting on the outside. Mammals have to CARE for their young. Mammals don’t just pop out of an isolated egg and know instinctually where to get food. The need for caring fosters the evolution of love. And somewhere in there the love evolves from caring for the young to caring for the partner who helps. But don’t some birds mate for life? Yes but they’ve evolved a long way from the reptiles.

The LOVE DESIRE NEXUS...

... is the next level up. All kinds of desire spring from there. The desire for love and sex represent the innate need to procreate, to preserve the line of DNA. Caring for the other, expressing affection and appreciation, the lure of physical and emotional pleasure. And then the need to set up social structures that support the family and foster emotional growth.

But violence will still outsell love.

When events in the world trigger both the power-fear nexus and the love-desire nexus, power-fear will always win. Power-fear is more basic and it’s more dominant in the individual organism and in the culture. In spite of what adolescent male humans seem to feel, the desire to survive will always override the desire to get laid.

Most marital disputes and relationship break-ups are not about love, sharing, life style, dirty socks, infidelity or messing up my record collection. (Well maybe that last one.) They are about power. They are about who has the power to control the other or to end the relationship. You can’t break up with me. You promised. You’ll stay? OK. Now I can break up with you. You can’t fire me, I quit! Love cannot conquer anything in a relationship when one party can resort to the use of raw power.

The last desperate act of the powerless person in deep psychic pain is to end the life. It’s the only exercise of power that’s left. Any guidance toward learning to love one’s life or self at that moment is far beyond the pale.

There are exceptions, but they only come after other needs evolve and express themselves. Intelligence must intervene to begin to modulate the levels of the unconscious. Social organizations, from families to tribes will begin to temper unconscious expressions, perhaps in some kind of group awareness of unconscious motives.

There are two sides to the power nexus, the need for it and the fear of losing it. Likewise, two sides to the love-desire nexus, the need for love and the desire for pleasure, opposed by the fear of losing love or of experiencing hate. So within these two most basic levels there can be tensions moving in at least six directions. See the diagram.

It gets complicated.

Because the forces in the unconscious, in men, in women and in society, compete with each other in all kinds of mixtures and proportions. Love is powerful but not as strong as raw power. We desire, need and love power. But a basic need for power must be filled before love and desire for anything else can emerge. That’s not the end of the story.

There is a third force that resides

in the unconscious. Can you guess what it is? Aren’t you curious? It will seem like the most powerful, and the most desirable, because it is the most human, the most highly evolved. But that assumption ignores the unconscious pecking order. It is curiosity, the need for knowledge, the fear of not knowing. As powerful as it is, it remains subservient to love and power, until the unconscious aspects of love and power enter consciousness.

THE SPLIT BRAIN

Almost all animals bigger than

a few cells have the capacity to learn. They express the most fundamental needs of living beings. In a sense they can ask the two or three most fundamental “questions:” “is that food?” and, “is that dangerous?” And only when those questions have been answered, “is that someone to have sex with?” In that order. Food is power. Danger is the loss of power. When the need for power is satisfied, the urge to procreate can arise. And miniature nervous systems organize themselves to remember the most vital patterns of answers.

As shared gathering and group hunting evolve into peer groups and societies, the very nature of knowledge grows exponentially. Mammal brains begin to divide into hemispheres. We evolve the ability to understand and manage situations using multiple areas of the brain. We can look at a tool as its function, its history, its name, and its construction for example. Memory and basic world views begin to take mental shape. The most rudimentary levels of thinking begin to separate.

The “top” layer of the unconscious is the

KNOWLEDGE - IDENTITY NEXUS.

From the nurturing of families and the security of tribes, the beginnings of higher intelligence and culture begin to form. Language creates the “software” for communication, the sharing of knowledge and a more detailed symbolic memory. Social organization allows the formation of basic “cultural knowledge” that can be spread and passed on.

We seek and share knowledge

of the world so we can better pursue power and love. And much later, in primate societies and among other intelligent mammals, even more complex brains foster the early stages of identity and self-image. Scientists who research primates and brain activity conduct fascinating studies on how and when chimps for example begin to develop self-awareness or a self-image. They notice when a domesticated gorilla expresses curiosity about “what’s going to happen next.” Among a group of primates they can observe one individual correctly predicting what another is thinking.

It’s complicated and speculative,

but the ability to think at multiple levels seems to lead to self-awareness, a sense of identity and a self-image. So in this theoretical model, identity and self-knowledge are a product of innate curiosity, a “level within a level” of unconscious desire.

The motives behind the desire

for self-knowledge, once a glimmer of self awareness appears, should be clear. One wants to be loved, to feel that one is recognized and accepted, first by the mother, then by the family and tribe.

The desire is to hold a positive image of the self, and to have confidence in one’s identity, regardless of feedback from others. The fear is of a negative self-image, one different from what one wishes to be, or the knowledge that one occupies a weak, confused, immature or otherwise negative identity. Clearly, aspects of love and power are attached to general knowledge, to the self-image, and to self-knowledge.

The roots of the narrative conflict

are there right from the beginning. And curiosity is rooted back there in those first two or three questions. So curiosity, the desire for knowledge, including self-knowledge is at the top, weakest position among the unconscious forces.

You are interested in a character

... because something tells you the character is like you. We can even relate to and identify with animals. Dumbo, Lady and the Tramp. The gazelle on the savannah trying to outrun the cheetah. Any character, cast as a protagonist, offers us someone to relate to, and an identity to adopt and occupy. The movie screen is a mirror. Part of the hook is imagining we’re watching some version of ourselves.

There is a border or boundary

... between the conscious and unconscious minds. It is a fuzzy grey zone, not a hard line. Freudian slips, rationalizations, unrealistic fears and compulsive desires are signposts at the frontier. Within the unconscious, the power-fear nexus at the base is the most pervasive and powerful. It has two sides: the need for power and the fear of losing it, the ability to express power and the fear of being overpowered. The middle level is the love-desire nexus. Here reside pleasure, the need for sex and love, desire in many different forms.
Desire and the need for love are opposed by the fear of losing love or of being rejected. The curiosity-knowledge nexus at the top is the weakest. Desire for knowledge is opposed by the fear of not knowing or of losing mental control. This level includes a sense of identity and a desire for self-knowledge, and the fear of the loss of identity, or of a negative self-image.

Within and between these levels of the unconscious mind, there are two significant dynamics at work. One is the power that the whole unconscious exercises invisibly on the conscious mind, on behavior and on the society. Second, the dynamics within and between the three levels: power supersedes love, love supersedes knowledge. We can again refer to adolescent emotion: “madly in love” clearly implies the loss of rationality (knowledge) in the pursuit of love. Within each level there are the two opposite sides: the need for and the fear of losing. So the dynamics are complex. The fear of losing love can conflict with need for self-knowledge. The fear of the power of another may fight with the desire for the love of that same other. And so on. See the diagram.

We resist giving in to love, falling in love, especially after 30 or so, because we sense there are unconscious forces at work. Specifically because we know we are giving up power to that person who will now have control over one’s self. We sense but seldom admit that we engage in intimate relations (beyond the pure pleasure aspect) because it enhances our image of ourselves.

“Jack is in love with Jill’s image of Jack.” (R.D.Laing)

Once a relationship grows out of the infatuation stage, we begin to learn stuff about ourselves, but it is often it is stuff we don’t want to know. So the desire for love, the power balance, knowledge of the feelings of the other, and the changing self-images come into direct conflict.

We generally seek knowledge because knowledge is power. Knowledge of the power of love, and knowledge of the role of power in love: both let us experience love in a more mature and sane way. But with new knowledge and the passage of time we often find we think differently about what we love and want.

We think and believe that we are rational creatures, that we weigh and compare choices and decide on the basis of information and knowledge, and much of the time this is true. But it’s also true, psychologically provable, that we can’t make any decisions without engaging emotion, intuition and instinct. And in retrospect we all know we have made decisions that seemed rational in the moment, yet later force us to ask, “what was I thinking?”

The unconscious mind is sometimes called the “animal brain,” or the “body’s brain.”

It is a lot like a child: selfish, demanding, completely unaware of the nature of the emotions that engulf it. The unconscious is also a little like the devil, as described in the movie “The Usual Suspects,” “the smartest thing the devil ever did is to convince us he doesn’t exist.”

The unconscious does not want

to be understood or controlled. It would lose some of its power. It wants to be loved but in a selfish, childish way and it will use power to get that love. The unconscious wants, and usually gets both: the ability to express power, love and knowledge, in the proper pecking order, and to have the motive behind the expression, and the hierarchy, remain secret.

Sigmund Freud discovered,

late in his career that self-deception is one of the most powerful psychological forces. It cast some serious doubt on some of his early work and drew angry contradictions from colleagues. Self-deception in its various forms is another key to unlock the unconscious. We delude ourselves in the face of knowledge that will change our power or our claim to love. We reject obvious truths when they interfere with our use of power or our pursuit of our desires. Denial is also key. Denial is the fear of knowledge that will force us to change: our image of ourselves, our approach to power, our desires.

“You can’t get a man to believe something, when his job depends on him not believing it.” (Sinclair Lewis)

The moral of the story.

The expression of power and desire, in the individual and in the culture at large, are distorted to the point of being self-destructive, because they are rooted in the unconscious, and because the unconscious has the power to confuse and undermine rationality. Emotion can and often does overpower what we know is right. Again, can our obscene level of material consumption (desire), our suicidal destruction of the environment (power) and our denial of these extreme and irrational behaviors be explained any other way?

Distorted expressions of love, willful ignorance and power in particular will dominate us as individuals and as a culture (local to global) unless and until we bring the unconscious roots of these expressions into the light of day and give new knowledge power over them.

We are living in a state of widespread cultural denial. We are confronted by an image of the unconscious destruction we have wrought. We don’t want to admit our mistakes or take responsibility. We are at a crossroads in civilization and we really don’t want to deal with it.

End of story.