The sweeping changes and crises in the guiding myths of contemporary cultures provide the  context of the individual's psychological and spiritual development. A five-stage process for  facilitating the evolution of an individual's personal mythology is illustrated in a detailed case  study, and the psychosocial tasks that must be accomplished to successfully navigate each stage  are discussed.

Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach
of the vocabularies of reason and coercion.-- Joseph Campbell (1968, p. 4)

Psychotherapy is always framed by the culture's broader mythological conflicts. Not to understand this relationship is to miss a critical dimension of the client's existential situation (Feinstein, 1990). Mythological thinking, simply defined, involves the quintessential human ability to address the large questions of existence using symbolism, metaphor, and narrative. Much of the psychological suffering that people experience is entangled with personal myths that are not attuned to their actual needs, potentials, and circumstances. Furthermore, a personal mythology that is unable to serve as a bridge to deeper meanings and greater inspiration than an individual can find in the outer world is typically accompanied by a nameless anxiety. Understanding the interaction between guiding myths and well-being is particularly critical and challenging in the contemporary era of unprecedented disruption in the culture's mythology (May, 1991).

Psychotherapy is the most celebrated technology of modern Western cultures for intervening in the internal models, the personal myths, that are at the core of ongoing experience. Consider, for instance, the propitious developments over the past two decades in the cognitive therapies, where the beliefs, feelings, and thought patterns associated with various psychological difficulties, personality disorders, and dysfunctional forms of behavior have been carefully mapped.

Core beliefs for people with obsessive compulsive personality disorders might, for example, include, "I need to be in complete control of my emotions" and "if I don't perform at the highest level, I will fail," while people with passive aggressive personality disorders might hold the core belief, "I have to resist the domination of authorities but at the same time maintain their approval and acceptance" (Beck & Freeman, 1990). Such beliefs are the expression of deeper mythic structures; understanding them within a mythological perspective embraces the larger cultural and spiritual dimensions of psychotherapy.

A NEW ORDER OF MYTH

Due to the speed of social change, the democratization of information (Meyrowitz, 1985), the breakdown of community (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1985), and the ascendance of the individual ego in the structure of the Western psyche (Wilber, 1995), mythology is be coming an increasingly personal affair, more and more the property and responsibility of each individual. As Campbell (1949) put it, in former times "all meaning was in the group" while today "all meaning is in the individual" (p. 388). The culture's new mythology is being hammered out on the anvil of individual lives, and teaching people to develop expertise in this process is a viable cross-disciplinary mission for the social sciences. In fact, as the enterprise of psychotherapy is squeezed ever more tightly into the Procrustean bed of its medical model (Sanua, 1996), new frameworks that appreciate the mythic dimension of personal difficulties are urgently needed.

PERSONAL MYTHS DEFINED

A personal myth is a constellation of beliefs, feelings, images, and rules operating largely outside of conscious awareness that interprets sensations, constructs explanations, and directs behavior. For an internal system of imagery , narrative, and affect to be called a personal myth, it must address at least one of the core concerns of human existence, the traditional domains of mythology. According to Campbell (1949), these include: 1) the hunger to comprehend the natural world in a meaningful way; 2) the search for a marked pathway through the succeeding epochs of human life; 3) the need to establish secure and fulfilling relationships within a community; and 4) the yearning to know one's part in the vast wonder and mystery of the cosmos.

Personal myths explain the external world, guide personal development, pro vide social direction, and address spiritual questions in a manner that is analogous to the way cultural myths carry out those functions for entire groups of people. Personal myths do for an individual what cultural myths do for a society. A personal mythology is the system of complementary as well as contradictory personal myths that organize experience and direct behavior.

A personal myth may be thought of as a template. Like the seal that stamped a king's insignia into wax, personal myths imprint an individual's unique way of organizing reality onto the raw materials of experience, helping to shape the person's characteristic styles of perceiving, feeling, thinking, and acting. Myths, in the sense being used here, are not stories, attitudes, or beliefs, although each of these may reflect a deeper mythology. Nor are myths properly judged as being true or false, right or wrong, but rather as more or less functional for the development of an individual or group - and even that evaluation is inevitably made according to the dictates of a larger myth.

"Myth" is being used here with the recognition that a) the fundamental task of the human psyche is to construct a model of reality, a guiding mythology; b) this guiding mythology embraces the spiritual foundations of a person's psyche as well as the more traditional areas of psychology, such as emotion and logic; and c) the success of individuals in generating a vital and valid guiding mythology determines, to a large part, their success in life.

THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSION While myth-making is a way of grappling with life's most profound and ethereal questions, it begins in the chemistry of the brain. The most evident sources of personal myths are biology, biography, and culture (Feinstein & Krippner, 1997). People can think mythically because the brain chemically codes events and then uses imagery and narrative to process this coded experience (Damasio, 1994). Individual differences in myth-making trace in part to temperament, which is linked to biological factors that ultimately influence a person's mythology, including the genetic predispositions to move toward or away from stimuli, to be more or less inhibited, and more or less fearful (Kagan, 1994). In terms of biography, every emotionally significant challenge and interpersonal event tends to exert an influence on the individual's developing worldview (Epstein, 1994). The person's mythology is also, to a large extent, the culture's mythology in microcosm. The culture's impact on individual mythology is, in fact, so ubiquitous and generally invisible to the person that ordinary consciousness has been referred to by Tart (1986) as a "consensus trance." A fourth source of individual mythology is rooted in transcendent, or spiritual, experiences-those episodes, insights, dreams, and visions that have a numinous quality, deepen a person's values, expand perspectives, and inspire creativity (Feinstein & Krippner, 1997). Spiritual development can be described, without metaphysical speculation, as an enhanced attunement to the subtle patterns and hidden forces in nature that comprise the wider context of the human story. According to the anthropologist Malinowski (1954), myth has traditionally addressed the spiritual realm by describing "a primeval, greater, and more relevant reality" (p. 108). It is in mythology's embrace of the spiritual dimension of experience that a mythically attuned framework exhibits its most distinctive strengths over approaches that are more behaviorally, cognitively, or psycho-dynamically oriented. To live mythologically, according to Wilber (1981), "means to begin to grasp the transcendent, to see it alive in oneself, in one's life, in one's work, friends, and environment" (p. 126).

Personality theorists, from Freud onward, have often associated spirituality with psychopathology, yet psychological research has consistently identified correlations between "spirituality" and mental health. For example, people reporting mystical experiences scored lower on psychopathology scales and higher on measures of psychological well-being than did others (Hood, 1974; Spanos & Moretti, 1988). Scientific research on this topic dates back to William James's (1901/1961) landmark investigation of religious experiences. James described numerous provocative encounters with the "reality of the unseen" (p. 58), such as the following account from the psychiatrist R.M. Bucke:

I was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant, I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city; the next, I knew the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw...that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love. (pp. 313-314)

While personal myths usually evolve gradually, such "revelations" can shift a person's guiding mythology in a single stroke, and they are not uncommon during experiences involving extraordinary states of consciousness, whether spontaneous, such as in "near death" experiences, or cultivated through a contemplative discipline such as meditation.

Beyond the impact of any unusual experiences that may reveal a glimpse into a larger reality, the spiritual dimension of a person's mythology also exists in a more fundamental sense. May (1981) defined human destiny as "the design of the universe speaking through the design of each one of us" (p. 90). The human body was, ultimately, assembled from the Earth's surface and atmosphere, according to laws of evolution that totally transcend the individual's story. From the ground up, we are each a product of the planet and the cosmos. All of the principles that govern them govern us. As decisively as we carry the genes of our parents, we carry the design of the universe. To reflect upon this relationship is to reflect upon the spiritual realm of existence; to perceive it through direct experience is to open to the deepest sources of one's being.

CASE HISTORY

The following account illustrates how a mythic perspective can be applied to working with a person in an existential crisis:

Adele was content with her responsibilities as a mother and homemaker while her children were still young. When her daughter and two sons reached adolescence, she returned to college where she earned a master's degree in journalism. Her amiable marriage had been more dutiful than impassioned, and once the children had left home, the marriage dissolved with surprisingly little attempt by either partner to salvage it.

Adele had taken a job writing feature articles for a mid-sized newspaper. While she had looked forward to the freedoms she could enjoy when her responsibilities as a parent had ended, she found herself obsessed with her work, spending every waking moment thinking about and researching stories. She wasn't particularly ambitious for her career (she had turned down invitations to write for two larger papers), yet she was driven, at the expense of most of the pleasures that were now available to her, and an ill-defined sense of emptiness would sometimes engulf her. Her endless activity shielded her from this feeling, but the busier she became, the more intense and frightening was the feeling when it did break through.

By the time Adele sought psychotherapy, she was 15 pounds below her normal weight, having some difficulty sleeping, and was secretly questioning the validity of everything she was doing. After three months of treatment, her depression had lifted, she was eating and sleeping better, but she was still feeling trapped and alone in the face of her public role. Her columns were widely applauded but this only added to the pressure she felt when writing each new piece. She was referred to an intensive weekly group that focused on its participants' guiding myths.

The group provided a setting in which she could begin to explore the feelings of emptiness that so frightened her. These feelings were readily traced to her childhood. Her father had died when she was seven and, as the eldest of three, much of her childhood died with him. Bringing herself back into the experience, she was able through her adult eyes to name the myth that had guided her through her childhood years, through college, and through successfully raising her own children, but which was now breaking down: "There is a job to do and I will do it well even if it kills me." A tremendous amount of grief broke through with this realization. While she had mourned the loss of her father, she had not mourned the loss of her childhood. She also came to understand how her guiding myth led her into a pallid, dutiful marriage, and how living according to the myth was now squeezing the passion out of her career. During this process, as the dysfunction of her old myth was becoming clear to her, no comforting alternate myth appeared, no better way of orienting herself.

Adele recorded six dreams, over four months, in which she was caring for an injured animal. In the first, the animal was a black bunny; in the fifth and sixth dreams, it was a she-wolf. The animals grew healthier and stronger in each dream until, in the final dream, the wolf accompanied her to her home, which in the dream was at the edge of a forest. The wolf looked longingly into the woods, stared at her, again glanced at the forest, turned to her, licked her cheek, and trotted off. She hid her sadness as she watched it disappear into the wild. The dream helped her recognize how she had long ago separated from a primal, wild part of herself while smiling and hiding her sadness. She thought it a positive sign that the animals were becoming stronger in the dream series.

After these dreams, Adele began to become aware of impulses she had not previously registered, including a romantic attraction to a long-time collaborator and an interest in friends' invitations to go river rafting that she had routinely turned down. She had not dated during the three years between the dissolution of her marriage and the start of her therapy group, telling herself she had already "paid her dues." Her colleague responded to her subtle signs of interest, but as they became romantically involved, he complained that she had no time to cultivate a relationship. Similarly, after expressing interest in rafting to her friends and having had them help her buy some gear, she cancelled what was to be her first trip because of work demands.

In a guided-imagery sequence led by the group facilitator, two images appeared spontaneously, which Adele later interpreted as symbols representing two faces of her passion. The first was of her head bulging with a dense and purple energy. Working later with this image, she realized that her major problem was not that her life lacked passion, but that all of her passion was narrowly channeled into her work. To accomplish this efficiency, she continually filtered and regulated her passion through her mind, and the dense purple energy clogging her head symbolized the arrangement quite well. The second image depicted the purple energy, now more fluid than dense, dancing throughout her entire body, leaving her with feelings of freedom and rapture. She began to refer to her old myth, which seemed focused, controlled, and serious, as "The Passion of the Mind," and to her emerging myth, which seemed spontaneous, playful, and joyful, as "The Passion of the Body."

In dialogues that enacted the part of her that identified with the old myth and the part that identified with the emerging myth, each character was severely critical of the other. "The Passion of the Mind" claimed the high road, with its focused productivity and ability to succeed against difficult odds. But Adele also realized that it was yielding diminishing returns. It had been an immensely effective strategy when she was seven and forced to care for her two younger siblings. It was an adequate strategy for the rich and rewarding job of bringing up her children. But now, with no intimates and no interests outside her job, "The Passion of the Mind" was taking her down an ever-narrowing path.

"The Passion of the Body," however, was unpredictable and impossible to control. When she would, in the group sessions, attune herself to it, she would first hear the harsh judgments of her mind, telling her she was wasting her time with this useless activity, and that she should get back to work. Once the group leader had Adele "breathe into" the purple energy that was compacted in her head, and to her amazement, her sense of constriction and emptiness began to transform. She started to feel warm sensations move throughout her body. She realized that when "The Passion of the Mind" was activated, which was most of the time, she simply didn't feel her body, was not aware of it unless something was quite wrong. It was not a source of pleasure. But when Adele "breathed into" the purple energy, she felt an aliveness in her body that dissolved her sense of emptiness. This was the "Passion of the Body" at a level she had rarely experienced.

The group helped Adele design a ritual she could use to evoke "The Passion of the Body" between sessions. She set aside time on Friday and Tuesday evenings for the ritual: Fridays to usher her away from her work week and into "The Passion of the Body" for the weekend, and Tuesdays to bring "The Passion of the Body" into her work week. She prepared for her ritual by turning off the phone and lighting candles in her bathroom and her bedroom. She began with a long relaxing bubble bath in the candlelight. After the bath, she did a brief yoga routine designed specifically for uplifting one's energy. Then, lying on her bed, she listened to classical music, allowing the music to move through her body. These sessions became like meditations, and rich imagery would dance in and out of the music.

In response to an assignment given her during a group session, Adele made up a fairy tale about the two faces of her passion. She selected a middle-aged female librarian to represent "The Passion of the Mind" (exaggerating old stereotypes about librarians) and a beautiful young girl to represent "The Passion of the Body." The girl, however, was emaciated from having been locked away in a cave for many years. In the story, the librarian is at first disdainful of the girl, but eventually helps her back to health, and is herself revitalized in the process. Personifying the two sides of herself in this manner allowed Adele to create a forum she could use to explore her inner conflict and try out possible solutions within the safety of her imagination. The parable of the healthy girl in passionate rapport with the librarian became the symbol of Adele's new myth, which she called the "The Passion of the Dance."

Adele made choices differently when she was living from "The Passion of the Dance." As a journalist, she saw firsthand much that was disturbing. She had mobilized "The Passion of the Mind" to bring her stories to the public in a way that stirred people, and she had been effective. But when Adele looked at the world through "The Passion of the Dance," she gained new insight into the people she was investigating. Her writing changed. It had been on the evangelical side; now, she was writing simple, poignant stories about human suffering, injustice, courage, compassion, and triumph. People liked this shift, and she heard more frequently of situations where a story she had written inspired constructive action by a reader.

In the meantime, Adele focused on only one writing assignment at a time, rested when she needed to rest, and, with a neighbor, began to dance to aerobic workout tapes for about 20 minutes each day before dinner. She cultivated a new and deeply nourishing love relationship. As she felt success in translating her new myth into her life, she left the group after two years of weekly meetings that had been supplemented by periodic psychotherapy sessions. She continued to devise new rituals that supported the "Passion of the Dance," and she kept a journal for working with her dreams and reflecting upon her evolving mythology.

A FIVE-STAGE MODEL

Regardless of their theoretical orientation, clinicians can introduce a mythic dimension to their thinking. The model presented here can be used as a shared perspective for the counselor and the client as they explore how the client's deeply personal and always evolving mythology forms a view of self, circumstances, and options. As people are able to uncover this mythic dimension of their inner lives, their thoughts, feelings, and behavior come to be understood from a larger perspective.

The mythology that dominated the first half of Adele's life organized it into a series of endless tasks and instructed her to complete them all flawlessly, no matter the personal cost. Her mythology was like a special lens that made these tasks jump out at her, luring her to submit to unrelenting pressures. Other possible ways of organizing her life passed unnoticed. Adele's shift to a new guiding myth illustrates a five- stage process that is patterned after the way personal myths naturally evolve. Each stage, rather than being a clearly demarcated line, defines a set of tasks that must be accomplished for subsequent stages to be successfully completed. In actual practice, the tasks of two or more stages are often simultaneously engaged.

1. Identifying the mythic conflict underlying psychological difficulties. The first stage of intervening in a person's mythology involves framing personal difficulties in terms of deeper mythological conflict. The failure of a guiding myth may already be quite evident to the client, but clinical detective work can more fully reveal how a presenting problem may grow out of a breakdown in a guiding myth. Adele knew she was unhappy, but she didn't know why or how to make herself feel better. She came to recognize two opposing interior forces, which she interpreted as mind and body. Each had its own mythology, its own way of telling her about where to focus her attention, what to value, and how to behave. "The Passion of the Mind" dominated her life, and its expanding influence was causing increasing psychological difficulties for her. Repetitive dysfunctional behavioral patterns, such as involvement in abusive relationships or chronic vocational failures, as well as clinical symptoms such as addictions or hypertension, may provide an entry into areas of the person's mythology that are begging for attention. Dream symbols and other productions of the unconscious, such as drawings or free association, may also highlight such areas. The clients ' presenting complaints, self-defeating behavioral patterns, and unconscious symbolism might each reveal deeper conflicts in that person's guiding mythology.
    

2. Understanding both sides of the conflict.  The second stage focuses on the roots of each side of the mythic conflict, excavating the foundations of the prevailing myth and of the counter-myth that is emerging to challenge it. Adele was overcome with compassion for herself as a little girl when she recognized the determination and stamina she had to muster to care for her younger brother and sister. This gave her respect for the myth she called "The Passion of the Mind," even as she was beginning to renounce it. At the same time, she looked on, and not without discomfort, as another myth was emerging to challenge it, one that was more attuned to her physical body and her personal needs and desires. Exploring the prevailing myth inevitably leads to an examination of the client's childhood and the conditions that made the old myth an adaptive choice, often a brilliant strategy for emotional survival (Miller, 1991). Psychological healing and repair work around the circumstances that led to the old myth's formation can be effectively initiated here. During this work, the clinician should also be alert for new solutions the psyche is attempting to generate in the form of a counter-myth that adjusts for the old myth's limitations. Counter-myths emerge in counterpoint to failing myths, highlighting possibilities, revealing new ways of being, and supporting underdeveloped aspects of the personality. Their imagery may be creative and inspiring but, like wish-fulfillment dreams, to which they are psychologically akin, they are framed in the primary process logic of magical thinking and immediate gratification. The task in this stage of the work is to bring these opposing internal forces into consciousness, to recognize and appreciate each, and to trace their roots in the individual's culture, personal history, and preconscious cognitions and imagery.
    

3. Conceiving a new mythic vision that integrates the most vital aspects of the old and the emerging myths.  The third stage brings into consciousness the dialectical conflict that naturally exists between the prevailing myth and the counter-myth and focuses on its resolution. Adele came to view the areas of distress in her life as arenas for working through her mythic conflict. The conflict between the two myths expressed itself in the tension between working and river rafting, working and dating, working and virtually any other activity. It was also reflected in her two different styles of writing her columns-one more evangelical, the other placing greater confidence in the reader's visceral ability to form conclusions based on facts rather than to have to be intellectually persuaded. Adele found a new image that surpassed both that of mind and body: the radiant girl working in joyful harmony with the librarian-"The Passion of the Dance"-which retained the most vital aspects of each side of the conflict, yet added, with the element of teamwork, a quality that transcended either side. While the psyche naturally moves toward the resolution of psychological conflict, actively participating in the process can facilitate a more rapid, creative, and effective integration of the two sides. By recognizing the value of facing their own inconsistencies without a retreat into the old or a flight into the emerging, people can learn to work out their conflicts in their inner lives rather than having to live them out on the rack of life.
    

4. Refining the new mythic vision and making a conscious commitment to it.  In the fourth stage, the vision that has been cultivated to this point is tested and refined until the person is able to affirm a commitment to a carefully articulated new mythology. Adele realized that "The Passion of the Dance" held the potential of helping her to resolve vital external and internal conflicts. As she contemplated and refined this image, her commitment to it deepened. The line between this and the previous stage is particularly thin. The dialectic process needs to run its course, but a point comes at which consciously identifying with a sensitively crafted mythic image both shapes and hastens the resolution. Challenging the person to formulate an explicit choice at this point exercises an active participation in the evolution of the guiding mythology and leads to an enhanced sense of mastery in that process. In addition to a rational, cognitive-oriented analysis of the new mythic vision, techniques that utilize non-ordinary states of awareness, such as dream work (Krippner, 1990), breathwork (Grot 1988; Hendrick & Hendrick, 1993) and guided visualization (Lazarus, 1984), are particularly apropos as the client examines and refashions the newly formed mythic image.
    

5. Translating a new mythology into daily life.  The final stage of the model requires clients to become practical and vigilant monitors of their commitment to achieve a harmony between daily life and the renewed guiding mythology they have been formulating. Adele did not automatically begin to live according to the "Passion of the Dance." Her rituals were structured activities that strengthened this new mythology and anchored it into her life. Her resolutions to get enough rest, not accept more assignments than she could handle with equanimity, and exercise regularly were also ways of supporting this new mythic vision. The threads of the new myth need to be woven into everyday behavior, thoughts, and actions. This phase draws particularly from the cognitive and behavioral therapies-using techniques such as behavior rehearsal, visualization, monitoring of sub-vocalizations, and contingency management-in assisting people to integrate the new mythology into their lives.

A COGNITIVE/PSYCHODYNAMIC MODEL OF MYTH

A research program conducted by Epstein (1994) has validated a model of information processing that "integrates the cognitive and psychodynamic unconscious" (p. 709). This model is particularly instructive for understanding personal myths and how they develop. Just as scientists use theories to organize their findings and plan new experiments, Epstein (1983) noted that "people need theories to organize their experience, anticipate events, and direct their behavior in everyday life" (p. 220). He referred to these internalized systems of information as personal, implicit (understood though not directly expressed) theories of reality.

Following Epstein, a personal mythology is an implicit theory of reality comprised of postulates about oneself, the world, and the relationship between the two. These postulates are derived from emotionally significant experiences, developed in the course of living, usually formed without conscious attention. They are both explanatory and motivational. Explanatory postulates are descriptions of oneself and one's environment, such as "Father beats me when I show anger" or "People readily trust me." Motivational postulates are instructions about what one must do to obtain what one desires and to avoid what one fears, such as, "I will hide my anger so father won't beat me" or "I will use people's trust to get them to do what I want."

Personal myths are organized hierarchically and in a manner that tends to promote compromise and balance in the fulfillment of basic needs. Low-order personal myths (Epstein's "lower order postulates"), such as the belief that mastering a particular area of knowledge will improve professional success, are quite specific and can usually be changed without jeopardizing the personality structure. Epstein's "higher order postulates" govern a person's fundamental concerns, such as sense of safety in the world, worthiness, relatedness to others, and purpose in life. Changes in high-order personal myths are often destabilizing because they are broad generalizations, central to the individual's entire scheme of reality.

Personal myths operate within both what Epstein (1994) called the rational system of information processing, which is largely conscious, and the intuitive system, which is largely preconscious. A given myth may function primarily within the preconscious system, as may be the case with a disowned "shadow" aspect of the psyche. Or it may function primarily within the rational system, such as in the case of a deliberately constructed "false self' that is only weakly connected to the deeper, preconscious system. But in the coding of a longstanding personal myth, the systems usually complement one another.

Personal myths maintain stability by assimilating (distorting) experiences that do not support them, and evolve by accommodating (adapting) themselves to experiences that contradict them (Piaget 1977). Mental content may also be perceived and encoded without awareness, and this dissociated material, according to Epstein (1983), forms its own subsystem, which is insulated from the remainder of the conceptual system. When a critical mass of information that cannot be accommodated accumulates, a counter-myth is formed that challenges the prevailing myth. The two engage in a dialectic struggle that may cause havoc in the person's life but eventually pushes toward a synthesis. Consciously participating in this process can lead to both a more rapid synthesis and a more favorable resolution.

PRINCIPLES BY WHICH PERSONAL MYTHS EVOLVE

The relationship between personal myths and ongoing experience is a relationship between psychological structures and psychological states. Psychological structures frame general patterns of perception, feeling, and cognition, while psychological states are the specific perceptions, feelings, and cognitions that one experiences (Combs, 1993). Think of the relationship between a container (the structure) and the liquid it holds. The liquid's ever-changing shape, temperature, and turbulence are like a psychological state. A personal myth is a set of interrelated containers (personal myths), each of which can give form to a cascading set of psychological states. Both psychological states and psychological structures are, according to general systems theory, "events in progress" (Combs, 1993, p. 51), with psychological states being "inflections" (p. 51) on psychological structures, cybernetically maintained by positive and negative feedback. Personal myths are relatively static psychological structures that, through positive and negative feedback, mold a person's perceptions, feelings, and ways of thinking in specific situations.

The following testable propositions describe the lawful processes by which personal myths seem naturally to develop. This presentation updates a previous formulation (Feinstein et al., 1988), and it integrates the propositions with other theoretical perspectives, particularly Epstein' s (1983, 1994) cognitive/psychodynamic model, Kegan's (1982) theory of psychological development as the evolution of a person's way of constructing meaning, Wilber's (1980, 1995) transpersonal developmental approach, McAdams's (1993, 1996) empirical investigations of personal myths, and the formulations of evolutionary psychology (Slavin & Kriegman, 1992). The individual's guiding mythology appears to evolve according to the following principles:

1. Over the life span, individuals pass through a sequence of guiding myths that reflect the "deep structure" of the psyche. Evolutionary psychologists speak of deep structures of the psyche, built into human character by natural selection. The capacity to be shaped by a social environment, for instance, is "hard-wired" even though the specific content of the psyche is socially formed, and, "to a significant degree, variable and open ended" (Slavin & Kriegman, 1992, p. 69). Borrowing from linguistics, Wilber (1995) distinguished between natively given deep structures of the self and culturally molded surface structures. He likened these structures to a multi-story building; each floor is part of the deep structure, while the furniture, tables, and chairs on each floor are the surface structures. Psychological development occurs as the self moves up from identification with one floor to the next. Major stages in the development of a person's consciousness involve the self detaching from primary identification with one deep psychic structure and changing its identification to an emergent higher-order structure. For Wilber (1980), with each successive level of consciousness, "an appropriate symbolic form-itself emerging at that stage-transforms each particular mode of consciousness into its higher-order successor" (p. 79). In the model presented here, personal myths have their foundations in the symbolic forms to which Wilber is referring.
    

2. To emerge from being psychologically embedded in one guiding myth and move to another involves a progression of differentiations and integrations. Personal myths exist within a psychosocial ecology that selects and reinforces those "mutations" or shifts in the individual's guiding mythology that optimize the development as dictated by a social context. If they are to remain viable, even the "fittest" mythologies are required to evolve continually. Epstein (1994) emphasized that the breakdown of a personal theory of reality has the potential for being constructive, as it can provide an opportunity for a new and more advanced theory to emerge. Such advances are necessary as new developmental tasks emerge and circumstances change. McAdams' s (1996) research program has identified the qualities of myths that sustain personal fulfillment. Such myths balance openness and flexibility with coherence, commitment, and resolve; accurately take into account the facts of personal ability and circumstances; become better differentiated and integrated; reconcile conflicting internal forces; and lead to a creative involvement in a social world that is larger than self-concerns. In his model of "the evolving self," Kegan (1982) described psychological development as an ongoing construction of meaning, a series of emergences from embeddedness in one level of subjective life to another, a succession of transformations where the self differentiates out "of an old center" and is integrated into a more complex and ideally more adaptive "new center" (p. 31). Kegan used the symbol of a helix to portray how, across the life span, people move beyond and then return to certain core issues from a higher level of organization.
    

3. Conflicts. Both in the individual's inner life and external circumstances, conflicts are natural markers of these times of transition. Kegan (1982) viewed the self’s emergency from an old to a new level of development as involving "a kind of repudiation, an evolutionary re-cognition that what before was me is not me" (p. 82). Moving up Kegan's helix, every developmental advance also involves a loss. The person may "resist mightily and mourn grievously the loss of a way of making meaning that the self has come to know as itself' before "a whole new way of organizing inner experience and outer behavior" can be brought into being (p. 225). When the prevailing mythic structure no longer serves the individual' s needs, alternative constructions are generated naturally and begin to be revealed in dreams and other portals into unconscious processes. Epstein (1983) observed that when emotionally significant experiences are inconsistent with an individual's personal theory of reality, the experiences can be dissociated, denied, or distorted through the use of defense mechanisms. In maintaining a myth that is failing, people generally experience an increasing degree of conflict that may manifest in their feelings, thoughts, actions, dreams, daydreams, and the circumstances they create for themselves. To treat such difficulties as markers of transition, rather than simply to resist them, promotes understanding and initiates a conscious mobilization toward resolving the underlying mythic conflict.
    

4. Typically, on one side of the underlying mythic conflict is a formerly constructive personal myth that has become self-limiting. According to Epstein (1983), the basic postulates in the individual's personal theory of reality are generalizations that were originally derived from emotionally significant experiences; because they were constructed early in life, they exert a formative influence in the development of later postulates. Unless a given experience is of unusual significance, it is not likely in itself to affect a basic postulate. Psychological defenses may also prevent individuals from recognizing features of their experience that are incompatible with the dominant myth, even as that myth becomes less capable of providing effective guidance. The greater the anxiety attached to an area of life with which a theory of reality must cope, Epstein pointed out, the more the theory is apt to take on an inflexible, driven quality, making it highly resistant to change. But, by understanding how the old myth developed and once served legitimate needs, it becomes more likely that one will embrace the valid guidance the myth still holds, even while distancing oneself from its dysfunctional aspects.
    

5. On the other side of the conflict is an emerging counter-myth that expands the individual's perceptions in the very areas the old myth limited them. Just as the psyche may produce inspiring dreams that point toward new directions for a person's development (Feinstein, 1991), it also creates new mythic images whose guidance is often in direct conflict with more limiting prevailing myths. Dissociated conceptual subsystems (Epstein, 1983) may become the core of a new mythic structure that organizes perceptions in a manner quite different from the pattern of the old myth. These "counter-myths" are woven from the accumulation of life experiences, from a readiness to accept more advanced myths of the culture, from a reservoir of unconscious primal impulses and archetypal materials, and from creative new perceptions that may be revealed in a "transpersonal" experience (Wilber, 1995). Counter-myths are best understood as creative leaps in the psyche's problem-solving activities, but they often lack real-world utility. Still, they serve as a force to integrate unrecognized impulses and images into the personality and to sustain qualities that have been repressed under the constraints of the old myth.
    

6. While this conflict may be painful and disruptive, a spontaneous mobilization toward a resolution occurs. This involves a dialectic pushing toward a new mythic construction that ideally synthesizes the most adaptive and developmentally progressive qualities of the old myth and the counter-myth. When a counter-myth challenges an outmoded myth, the person is caught between ,two worlds-no longer able to thrive under the guidance of what has been, but not yet having developed guiding images for the new direction that is being intuited. Kegan (1982) referred to the "evolutionary motion" of differentiation and reintegration (p. 39), and cited studies showing that the development of mature thought involves a dialectical logic that "recognizes its nourishment" in contradiction (p. 230). After describing the way conflicts inevitably arise between belief systems, within belief systems, and between beliefs and experiences, Epstein (1994) emphasized the basic striving for unity and coherence of any conceptual system. One of the tasks of a personal theory of reality, i.e., a personal mythology, is to foster the fulfillment of basic needs in a "synergistic, harmonious" rather than a "competitive, conflictual manner" (p. 716). By bringing this dialectic into awareness, people are empowered to work through the conflict as an internal challenge rather than be condemned to act it out unawares and at their peril. As Epstein (1991) noted, "it is when the conflict is not recognized that the experiential system is most apt to dominate and influence the rational system unreasonably" (p. 124).
    

7. During this process, previously unresolved mythic conflicts will tend to re-emerge. These have the potential of either interfering with the resolution of the current developmental task or opening the way to deeper levels of resolution in the person's mythology. Epstein (1994) pointed out that "material that can neither be ignored or assimilated keeps re-emerging in abortive attempts at assimilation" (p. 717). Kegan (1982) explained that each new stage of psychological development finds its necessary preconditions in a previous stage that was achieved with at least some minimal degree of adequacy. Going higher on Kegan's helix, issues that previously seemed resolved may re-emerge, inviting new solutions from a developmentally more advanced vantage point. Procedures are available that utilize guided imagination to bring people back experientially to a period where their development was arrested, and to provide this "younger self' with an emotionally corrective rite of passage that leads to the next developmental tier and into a more advanced personal mythology (Feinstein & Krippner, 1997).
    

8. When a newly synthesized personal mythology has been formulated; reconciling it with the existing life structure becomes a vital developmental task. Longstanding myths, however dysfunctional, are so embedded in the person's way of living and habits of thought and behavior that they tend to die hard. Adapting to even an inspiring new myth often requires substantial focus and commitment. As the person moves from being immersed in the issues of one psychosocial stage to the next, the content of concerns (what Kegan [1982] referred to as the "Front Page News" in the person's life) can change dramatically. Wilber (1995) described the process encompassed by the first seven propositions above, in which the self shifts its identification from one psychological structure to a more advanced structure, as a transformation of consciousness; this is followed by a translation of the individual's life according to the basic structure of that level of consciousness. In Wilber's metaphor of a building, transformation involves a move to a new floor, translation is rearranging the furniture on that floor. As the self begins to identify primarily with a higher-level psychological structure, this more advanced mythology is "translated" into the particulars of daily life. The surrounding culture's view of such changes, and the rites of passage it provides or fails to provide for supporting them, may promote or inhibit the success of such transformations and translations.

CONCLUSION

Historically, myths and rituals offered a relatively unambiguous direction for regulating people's lives. Consciously weaving a carefully reformulated mythology into the fabric of one's life can serve vital functions that cultural rituals and rites no longer adequately address. Contemporary psychotherapy does, in fact, serve many of the functions once fulfilled by ritual and rite (van der  Hart, 1983). Behavioral scientists who have examined the territory being referred to here as a personal myth have introduced concepts such as personal constructs, personal fables, nuclear themes, cognitive structures, implicit theories, themata, scripts, and schema. The personal mythology model is formulated in a manner that explicitly attempts to address a number of problems that have proven difficult for other psychological models.

Psychological theories of personality, with their focus on internal processes, have, for instance, often failed to account adequately for social and cultural influences on human development. Because personal myths and cultural myths are fundamentally interconnected, the relationship of psyche and society flows naturally into the personal mythology framework. Mythology's embrace of the spiritual dimension of human experience has already been emphasized. A model that, at its base, recognizes the relative, metaphorical nature of any construction of reality is also attuned to the fundamental tenet of post-modern thought (and the essential insight of modern physics) that all knowledge is relative rather than fixed, local rather than universal (Krippner & Winkler, 1995). Any personal map of reality is a psychosocial construction (Anderson, 1990; Neimeyer & Mahoney, 1995), an innovation created jointly by the person and the culture, an interpretation of experience, an act of myth-making.

Another issue that psychotherapists have had to wrestle with involves the caustic implications, when attempting to assist a person on the arduous journey toward a fulfilling existence, of being historically rooted in a medical model that is based on the concepts of illness and treatment. A perspective recognizing that periodic mythic crises are part of the journey provides a dignified, non-pejorative, more shamanic alternative to the medical model for conceiving of expert intervention into a person's psychological development. Finally, the model presented here is accessible enough that people can quickly grasp the idea that their lives are shaped by their personal myths; yet, as they become more skilled in working with their myths, they are able to enter more deeply into the concept, and grow with it.

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