Been reading a lot of personality theory recently, partly because one book always leads to another, but also because I am currently writing a novel where one of my primary concerns is to create as real a character as I possibly can, I use these books not to create a character, but to understand the character that has already strolled into my head. I also tend to approach much psychology –n- that with scepticism, as there is no squishier, more subjective 'science' than psychology. However these books do tend to provide useful tools and approaches to thinking about people, especially the fictional sort.
At the moment I am reading 'The Stories We Live By – Personal Myths and the Making of the Self' by Dan McAdams. I chose it because I have often used the phrase 'personal mythology' to describe the main focus in my writing. By which, I meant the coherent narrative we make of our lives, and the way our narrative contrasts with other people's, and the narratives people create together. There is a negative element to my conception of the personal myth, the requirements of story can make that myth hide actual reality, and also with everyone being the hero of their own myth, but something else in other people's there are clashes.
This Dan man has a different idea of a personal myth. His theory is that this myth *is* a person's identity. That the core of a person through all of their roles is the person that emerges from this personal myth and the tone, voice and values of the myth are that of a person. He also thinks that to know a person intimately is to know this person's myth. It's an idea I can chime with.
The first part of the book describes how preschool children take images and ideas, that they will later build their myths out of. That these ideas are taken out of context and manipulated in a way an adult doesn't do, because an adult has already gathered and shaped the materials from their own childhood into the creation of the myth.
'This is how preschool children play and, to a certain extent, how they think. They appropriate images from their culture to suit their immediate wishes and desires. They make the image do what they want it to do, even in ways that see strange and illogical to adults.'
He then goes on to provide examples, of Snow White going to flying on a broomstick to the shops to buy a grapefruit to stick on the head of Oz's Wicked Witch of the West and melt her.
I dunno about the rest of you, but my mind works like this. He describes the preschool years as the years of gathering symbols and images to work into the stable life story a person tells about them. I've given myself the name Pica Pica here, the European m->-bleeped-<-ie. The insatiable collector, the constant forager for images, ideas and such to continue feeding in to the matrices of my brain, to feed the fire of my heart and general offal and to push through the sausage machine of my conscious and unconscious till it comes out as whatever it becomes.
I have often seen myself as red-riding hood, wandering the woods picking flowers for grandmother, half-knowing that I will never reach her warmth because there is an even perfect-er flower just over there that I need to pick first.
I always have this feeling that I am incomplete and that I am constantly preparing for something. Part of me thinks that all this busy, busy bumbling will emerge in my writing, that this drive to collect experience and image and such is all unconscious research. Another part of me feels that this creation will never be completed and the collections will never come of anything.
Anyone else have a similar thing? Maybe the non-linear qualities and childlike qualities displayed are because we are forever in this collecting phase of a self story.
The guy also says that children's play changes as children grow because their world views have a huge change from the egocentric to a more objective third person idea.
'(Play) becomes divorced from one's private symbolism. The private image of the moment gives way to the public sequence of public events.'
Not for Pica's it doesn't. Almost everything in life is another thing to codified in my private (and not always conscious) symbolism. All moments are private images...only made as part of a public event by conscious act. I have to translate all the time, as if I were speaking a second language....
Now are these common experiences, or are these ones just me?
