Thresholds

Our culture's folk psychology influences our journeys

OUR FOLK PSYCHOLOGY: HOW THINGS ARE AND HOW THINGS SHOULD BE

"Thought of the Week" for May 21, 2004

All cultures have as one of their most powerful constitutive instruments a folk psychology, a set of more or less connected, more or less normative descriptions about how human beings "tick," what our own and other minds are like, what one can expect situated action to be like, what are possible modes of life, how one commits oneself to learn them, and so on. We learn our culture's folK psychology early, learn it as we learn to use the very language we acquire and to conduct the interpersonal transactions required in communal life.

...["Folk psychology" is] a system by which people organize their experience in, knowledge about, and transactions with the social world....Since its organizing principle is narrative rather than conceptual, I shall have to consider the nature of narrative and how it is built around established or canonical expectations and the mental management of deviations from such expectations. (p. 35)

Note that it is only when constituent beliefs in a folk psychology are violated that narratives are constructed...[Folk psychology] summarizes not simply how things are but (often implicitly) how they should be. When things "are as they should be," the narratives of folk psychology are unnecessary. (pp. 39-40)

Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (pp. 39-40)

Comment:

Folk psychology as the ground
for the hero's journey

by Reg Harris

Copyright © 2005 by Reg Harris. All rights reserved. Revised October 7, 2007. All rights reserved. Apart from properly cited quotes and short excerpts, no part of this article can be copied or used in any form without written permission from the author. For permission to use, please contact me.

In the context of the Heroic Journey, our "Folk psychology" would be the ground which not only shapes, to a great extent, our individual, but which is also the ground against which our individual lives can take their shape. In other words, our folk psychology shapes our concept of self and then becomes the ground against which that self can grow and individuate. Bruner later discusses the idea that when an event falls outside the "canonical" parameters of the folk psychology, is narrative which accounts for it or pulls it into the canon.

There is here, I feel, a key point about the Journey pattern. The pattern is clearly based on narrative, a "story." In a sense we situate ourselves within the canon of our folk psychology and are called to a Journey (the creation of a new narrative, a new story) when something falls outside that canon. As Bruner writes, "it is only when constituent beliefs in a folk psychology are violated that narratives are constructed...When things "are as they should be," the narratives of folk psychology are unnecessary."

It is interesting to note here, as well, the elements or structure of a story or narrative and how they parallel the structure of the Journey pattern. Even essays tend to follow the general pattern (see my short article on "The Journey Pattern and the Essay).

Narrative lies at the core of human experience. It is the process which shapes our perception and understanding of the world, and it is the process by which we are shaped by those perceptions and understandings. Myth and ritual are elements in this process in that they are explicit representations (in language and in action, respectively) of the implicit order, and the Journey pattern, which is foundational in both myth and ritual, is the symbolic representation of this narrative process at its most fundamental level.