Stories We Live By:
Personal Myths Guide Daily Life
By Sam Keen
Psychology Today
December 1988
H
uman being is a fearless, storytelling animal,” says
Sandor McNab. We tell stories – myths – about
who we are, where we come from, where we are
going and how we should live. And the myths we
tell become who we are and what we believe – as
individuals, families, whole cultures.
As we turn the corner of a season and a year, many
of us are moved by two great mythic forces in our culture:
We celebrate the birth of Christ – the ultimate hero, whose
life has been called “the greatest story ever told” – and the
rebirth of the world, the new year, the new self we are
resolved to become. Ancient stories such as those of birth
and rebirth still have a powerful place in our society and our
psyches. They endure despite a tidal wave of science and
technology that has changed not only the landscape of our
cities, but our fundamental notions of the nature and destiny
of humankind. The wave of “rationality” has not washed our
psyches clean of myth. Rather, it has altered the stories we
tell about ourselves and replaced old myths with new ones
(such as the myths of “progress,” and “modernity”), which it
insists are not myths at all but “factual” accounts of
objective reality.
When we look at the panorama of the 20th century,
it’s clearly been shaped as much by unconscious myth as by
conscious science. In the salad years of our century, Freud
and Jung warned that beneath the veneer of reason, mythic
struggles between Oedipus and the Father, Eros and
Thanatos, Ego and Id are always being played out in the
psyche. And indeed they were right.
In politics, we have witnessed the demonic power
of myths of race and nation – blood-dreams of an Aryan
Reich, a pure Yamato people, lily-white suburbs. And in
God’s name various militant neo-fundamentalists
throughout the world have sown hatred, mounted crusades
and killed millions in new holy wars.
Meanwhile, East and West have been poised on the
edge of an apocalyptic battle ready to exterminate life to
defend their sacred myths, their “isms.” In the Vietnam War
era we watched a great nation, unable to break the spell of
such mythic metaphors as “domino effect” and
“containment of Communism,” descent into tragedy.
And everywhere that technology has carried the
myths of progress, entire species of our animal kin are dying
and watersheds are being polluted by insecticides that
promised better living through chemistry. Far from
marching into a rational future, the myth and politics of
modernity have unleashed the dread possibility that we may
indeed end our collective storytelling – and our story on this
planet – with a bang or a whimper.
Journalists often use the word “myth” to mean at
best a silly tale and at worst a cynical untruth – a lie.
Theologians and propagandists often brand as “myths”
religious beliefs and ideologies other than their own. And in
a way, they’re closer to the real meaning than journalists
are. In a strict sense, “myth” refers to interlocking stories,
rituals, rites, customs and beliefs that give a pivotal sense of
meaning and direction to a person, a family, a community or
a culture. The dominant myth that informs a person or a
culture is like the “information” contained in the DNA of a
cell, or the program in the systems disk of a computer. Myth
is the cultural DNA, the software, the unconscious
information, the program that governs the way we see
“reality” and behave.
We change our ways through changing the stories
we tell each other in fiction, political metaphors and even in
our songs. One of the most creative mythmakers today,
musical comedy playwright Stephen Sondheim, counters
our lonely narcissism with a vision of community as the
source of individuals’ strength and meaning.
A myth involves a conscious celebration of certain
values, always personified in a pantheon of heroes (such as
the wily Ulysses or the enterprising Lee Iacocca) and
villains (such as the betraying Judas or the barbarous
Kadaffi). But it also includes an unconscious, habitual way
of seeing things, an invisible stew of unquestioned
assumptions. A living myth, like an iceberg, is only 10
percent visible; 90 percent lies beneath the surface of
consciousness of those who live by it. Outsiders to a system
of myths – whether anthropologists, tourists or therapists –
can see it, but it’s nearly invisible to those inside. As the
saying goes, “We don’t know who discovered water, but we
are sure it wasn’t a fish.”
Differing cultural myths make Methodists
unthinkingly munch hamburgers and Hindus worship cows,
or make roast dog a delicacy in China and an outrage in
America. Each culture unwittingly “conspires” to consider
its myths as the truth – the way things “really” are. The
average American, for instance, would consider the potlatch
feast in which Indian tribes in the Northwest systematically
destroy their wealth as irrational and myth-ridden, but not
1
the suburban weekend habit of browsing malls and throwing
away money on expensive, unnecessary technotoys. We
view the Moslem notion of “jihad,” holy war, as a
dangerous myth but the invasion of Grenada is a political
necessity.
The organizing myth of any culture functions in
ways that are both creative and destructive, healthful and
pathological. By providing a world picture and a set of
stories that explain why things are as they are, that myth
unites a people, sanctifies the social order and gives
individuals a map of life’s path.
The myth offers security and identity, but it also
creates selective blindness, narrowness and rigidity because
it is intrinsically conservative. It encourages us to follow
“the faith of our fathers,” to imitate the way of the culture’s
heroes, to repeat the formulas and rituals exactly as they
were done in the old days. Such conservatism can work so
long as no radical change is necessary for survival.
Confronted with novelty – a natural catastrophe, a military
defeat, a new technology or a new system of myths – the
mystic mind is at a loss. It tries as Marshall McLuhan said,
to walk into the future looking through a rear-view mirror.
We can see the dual nature of myth in many
problems we face as a nation and as individuals. Consider,
for example, the myth of the individual that is central to the
American psyche and the American body politic. A
profound respect for the individual’s rights and freedoms
led to the creation of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
They limit the power of government and preserve the
highest degree of freedom to do business and exploit our
natural resources.
But the same mythic vision of a nation of
individuals also gives birth to a form of loneliness, anomie
and alienation that makes it difficult to deal with our largest
social problems. We relish the freedom to do our own thing
but cannot marshal the national will to create, for example, a
health-care system for our old and disadvantaged. Our sense
of individuality is often too strong and our sense of
community too weak to motivate us to promote the common
good. – for our fellow humans or for the natural
environment we all share. So the acid rain falls on the just
and the unjust, and we’re ambivalent about what – and how
much – the government should do about the homeless, air
pollution, the greenhouse effect, traffic jams.
The same range of creative-destructive mythic
possibilities permeates our family life. A family, like a
community, has stories and rituals that give it cohesion and
differentiate it from other families. Each member’s place
within the family is defined by those stories. For example,
obedient to the family script, Nan, “who always was very
motherly, even as a little girl,” married young and had
children immediately, while Anne, “the wild one, not cut
out for marriage,” sowed oat after oat before finding fertile
ground.
Family myths, such as those of the Kennedy clan,
may inspire us to endure hardships and tragedy. Or they
may, like the myths of many alcoholic or abusive families,
pass a burden of guild, shame and failure from generation to
generation as some abused children in turn become abusive
parents.
The entire legacy and burden of cultural and
familial myth come to rest, ultimately, on the individual.
Each person is a repository of many stories, old and new.
But what Santayana said about cultures is equally true for
individuals: “Those who cannot remember the past are
condemned to repeat it.” Unless we try to become conscious
of our personal myths, we are in danger of being dominated
by them. Neurosis, for example, can be viewed as an of told
story we repeat to ourselves and others (“Well, I’m not the
kind of person who can…” “I wouldn’t think of…”).
Personal myths become constricting and boring unless
they’re examined and revised from time to time. We need to
reinvent ourselves continually, weaving new themes into
our life narratives, remembering our past, revising our
future, reauthorizing the myth by which we live.
When Freud invented the “talking cure,” he
discovered the relation between forgetting and disease,
remembering and health, and created a new form of theater.
The good doctor Freud, under the spell of the myth of
“science,” would never admit that psychotherapy is a
species of storytelling, one closer to theater, the novel and
the dramatic arts than to science or medicine. Nevertheless,
in psychotherapy a troubled person hires a private theater
and an audience of one (or lately, a group) to recollect and
re-enact a lifetime of forbidden and untold stories. One day,
after many quite ordinary 50-minute hours, magic may
happen: Suddenly in the middle of telling the life story
though, backwards (regressing into the archaic), the spell of
the past is broken and the individual feels and sees
something new.
But being in psychotherapy is not the only way to
uncover and rewrite the myths in your life. For more than
two decades I have been exploring – and refining – other
ways to help people discover their personal myths.
My own search started with reading collections of
myths of various tribes and people, such as Frank Water’s
Book of the Hopi. I was struck by the recurrent fundamental
questions that all systems of myth attempt to answer –
questions such as: Where did I come from? Why is there
something rather than nothing? Why is there evil in the
world? What happens to me when I die? What are my
duties? What is taboo? What is the purpose of my life? Who
are the heroes and heroines? Who is our enemy? Who are
my helpers, guides, allies? What does the future hold?
Next, I asked these questions of myself and began
to sift through the stories about the meaning of life that I
had gotten from my family and my culture, as well as those
I had invented in the process of creating my own
autobiography. I discovered that I had a personal mythology
as elaborate as that of any Hopi or Hottentot.
My experience in exploring and rewriting my own
myths led me to share with others some things I learned. I
started to conduct seminars on “Personal Mythology,” often
together with the late mythologist Joseph Campbell, whom I
first interviewed for Psychology Today in 1971. In these
seminars, people were invited to share stories about their
heroes and villains, visions and quests, wounds, and gifts,
2
and to play with creating new myths, new autobiographies,
new ways of narrating the story of their lives.
Many people in the seminars found that sharing
personal myths with others helped to break through many
barriers – including the special autonomy and isolation of
Americans – that separates people from one another and
sometimes even from themselves. Communication creates
community when we discover and cherish what we have in
common is our uniqueness. Indeed, if the unique stories of
individuals are not cherished, a group of people may
become a mass, or a collective, but never a healing
community.
What follows are a few of the exercises that have
emerged from 20 years of these seminars. They’re yours to
play with, but they’re most likely to be helpful – and fun – if
you share them with another person; it takes two to tango, to
make love, or to recollect your myths. Surprisingly, we
usually don’t know many of the important episodes or
themes in our personal mythology until we hear ourselves
telling them to someone else. We discover our uniqueness in
the act of sharing.
Just about any one close can serve as an audience
for your tales – perhaps your husband, your wife, your child,
your lover, your best friend. Just let yourself go and have
fun playing with your recollections. If you get too serious
and insist on remaining a rational adult looking for the
correct formulas that will unlock the secret of your psyche
once and for all, you’ll kill the poetry and miss the power of
your mythic imagination. There are not right answers. Let
the child within you show and tell who you are.

Who are you? Begin with your official story the
one you habitually tell without thinking. Imagine you are
sitting beside a stranger on a train. Introduce yourself (“I
am…”), using a single word or short phrase that most
accurately characterizes you. Try it 10 times, completing the
sentence with different predicates that describe you, such as,
“I am a father,” “I am a Republican,” “I am a Marx Brothers
freak.”
Next, write down your 10 predicates and think
about what you have chosen to tell about yourself and what
you have left out. How many of your descriptive statements
have to do with your work? Your home life? Your gender?
Your race, religion, or nationality? Your passions? Your
possessions? To discover how important any one of these
predicates is to your sense of self, next time you introduce
yourself change one item, that is, invent. Make yourself
married instead of single, a plumber instead of a banker, a
radical instead of a Conservative.

What invisible cultural myths guide and inform
you? None of us can see the eyes through which we see the
world, or fully comprehend the myths that give shape to our
lives. But we can jump part way out of our skins by looking
at what is familiar through a stranger’s eye – although it
takes a lot of imagination, honesty and courage to do it well.
One of the simplest ways to discover some of the cultural
myths in your life is to play the anthropologist game. Gather
together two or three friends, both men and women. Empty
your pockets, wallets and purses onto a table. Now, imagine
you are anthropologists or visitors from Mars trying to
determine the myths and beliefs of those strange people who
call themselves “Americans.” Obviously, each person
carries a lot of objects: money, credit cards, breath mints,
medicines, keys. Some objects seem to have symbolic
significance and others practical use. What can you deduce
about the natives’ way of life, their values, their psyches,
their myths from these portable artifacts? Keys, for
example, might tell you something important about trust,
privacy, honesty. Do these people identify with the Visa
cult or the MasterCard clan?

What’s your personal myth? Take a step deep
into your personal myth by making a summary of your life
story. Make an outline of your autobiography. How do you
divide the times and events of your life? What are the names
and themes of your chapters? Who shaped and influenced
you? Imagine your story is to be published and the five most
pivotal events will be illustrated. What scenes would you
dramatize? What is the title of your story?

Where did you come from? Character and setting
are the figure and ground of your story. To understand you,
we need to fill in your background. As an individual, you
emerged slowly out of a context, like a coral island in the
sea. What is that setting for your story? Take a large piece
of paper and draw the floor plan of a house you lived in
before you were 10 years old. Sketch in all the furniture and
the landscape around the house. Take your listener on a tour
through your early environment, describing things the way a
novelist would. What was it like to live in that house? How
did things smell? What cast of characters inhabited the
house and what parts did they play in your family drama?
What social, political and economic forces and fears did you
sense even within the walls of the house – depression,
unemployment, wars, racial or class prejudices? What were
the rules of the house – the family’s 10 commandments?
What conflicts troubled the atmosphere? How much touch,
physical intimacy, was there from your folks, your brothers
and sisters?

What have you forgotten? It seems a violation
of common sense to ask, “Tell me what you can’t
remember.” But most psychotherapy is built on the
assumption that we unconsciously store – and can remember
if we try – many parts of our personal histories that we
cannot immediately bring to mind. Sexually abused children
often do not remember their abuse until they become
sexually active adults. We forget, or repress, both what is
too painful and too joyful to remember about the madness
and magic of childhood.
When you drew the floor plan of the house of your
childhood, where did you draw a blank? Are there places,
rooms, you cannot enter in memory? To discover the blanks
in your past, draw a series of floor plans of houses as far
back as you can remember and notice the empty places.
What went on in them? Sometimes, you can invite yourself
to dream about the events that once filed what is now a
vacuum in memory.
Another way to recover lost history is to draw a
line representing your life and mark memorable events year
by year. What periods of your life are rich or poor in
memories? Begin to ask your close relatives what happened
3
in those times you can’t remember. Every detail you recover
will trigger other memories, and gradually you will be able
to sketch in the outline of the years. This process is similar
to the way blacks, Native Americans and women have
recently written their histories by recovering journals and
documents that were excluded from standard historical
accounts.

Against what must I struggle? Who is my
enemy? A Central concern of mythology is the dramatic
conflict between good and evil. In an attempt to clarify,
myth oversimplifies, polarizes and divides the world into us
and them, light and dark, right and wrong, good and bad, a
way of life and a way of death. It personifies the conflict as
a cosmic struggle between God and the Devil. Myth justifies
all conflict and warfare, ancient and modern, by casting it as
a moral struggle between righteous heroes and demonic
villains. And “above” and “below” the temporal field of
battle, myth creates a geography of good and evil; a realm
of heaven and hell.
You can learn about the geography of your own
moral/mythic landscape by literally drawing it. Start with
your personal map of hell, a modern equivalent of Dante’s
Inferno. Assign places on your map and punishments for all
your enemies: people who have betrayed you; villains great
and small, real and literary; bad men and women; whole
organizations you despise. Who personifies for you vices
such as greed, cruelty, stupidity and banality? Hitler and
Stalin may command prominent places on your map, but
save some spots for two-bit sinners and bureaucratic
vampires. (My hell includes writers of IRS forms,
advertising agencies that lie for pay and producers of TV
sitcoms that aren’t funny and demean the human spirit.)
What punishments should befall people who commit minor
sins? Crimes of passion? The banal? The sadistic? Feel free
to sentence some who are near and dear to you – mothers,
fathers, lovers, former spouses – to a stretch in purgatory.
The way you organize your hell, whom you choose to
punish and for what will reflect your understanding of that
negation of goodness that goes by many names – maya,
illusion, alienation, evil, sin.

What is the nature of the good? Who are the
heroes and heroines? What ought I do? Now that you’ve
dispatched your enemies, make and organizational map of
heaven, the modern equivalent of Dante’s Paradise. Find
places and rewards for the great and the small: saints and
heroes; men and women of exceptional compassion,
courage, and creativity; pathfinders, guides, healers, helpers,
mentors, allies, friends, lovers, neighbors, visionaries,
caretakers, leaders. Give a human face to such virtues as
integrity, loyalty, gentleness, strength, wisdom and grace
under pressure. Be sure to include people you know well,
perhaps even yourself.
Along with your map of hell, your map of heaven
with its pantheon of major and minor heroes will tell you
how, beneath the surface of propriety and rationality, your
personal mythology divides the world of light from that of
darkness – and on what basis.

What does the future hold? What ideal, promise
or potential should we seek? Myth gives equal attention
to recollections of things past and previews of the future –
accounts that explain our origin and our destination. Like
the acorn’s promise of an oak, the past and present contain
the seeds of the future. By daring to remember paradise lost
– the disappointments, betrayals, failures, broken promises –
we may catch a glimpse of all that remains unfulfilled
within ourselves and may envision a more satisfying future.
Both myth and psychotherapy hold and the promise that
there is a link between memory and hope. In French
philosophers Gabriel Marcel’s marvelously paradoxical
definition, “Hope is a memory of the future.”
The future whispers its promise to us in the form of
fantasy. To preview your personal myth of paradise
regained, your ideal future, sit comfortably or lie down and
shut your eyes, Breathe deeply and slowly, and relax until
you are approaching sleep, then survey your life in your
mind’s eye. What have you completed and what is still
undone? Allow yourself to feel the void that remains within
you, and nostalgia for all that is incomplete, and hold there
questions in mind: “What has not happened to me yet? What
would have to happen in the future for me to approach my
death with a sense that my life was fulfilled?
Let your fantasies run free. After a while, interrupt
them, take a large sheet of paper, and draw the ideal
environment you would like to be living in 10 years from
now. Where do you life? Who lives with you? What kind of
community do you have? Friends? Work? Recreation?
Creative expression? What is happening in the political
worlds around you? Once you have glimpsed your desired
future, you can consider what you may do to bring it into
being.
We’ve only looked at some of the questions to
which tribal, national or personal mythology addresses
itself. But you’ll think of others if you pay attention to the
changing texture of your days. And for every question you
ask yourself, you will find a story to tell. Your stories, of
course, will not give you certainty or objective truth any
more that the ancient myths gave the Hebrews or the Greeks
accurate maps of the world. But they will fill you with the
stuff of romance, tragedy and comedy – the sources of an
entertaining life. And they will open you to the stories of
others, as common and singular as your own. That remains
the best way we storytelling animals have found to
overcome loneliness, develop compassion, and create
community.
4