The best way to belong to a group is to act like the group and as such, those stories formed a collective understanding of what is required of good boys and girls, thereby taking out the guesswork of what constitutes success for each.
What a relief! (Except, that is, for those poor individuals who did not resonate with these themes.
Such 'misfits' became outcasts or masqueraders in a society with gender roles so clearly defined.
As such, self-esteem and self-actualisation was not an easily achieved need, but that's another story...
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The value of shared understandings of group norms continues to be relevant to social functioning in modern times - one such example is marital satisfaction, which is found to be significantly higher in traditional marriages, structured around clearly defined gender roles as outlined above, than in modern, non-traditional marriages due in part to the ill-defined role expectations for husbands and wives.
Such findings are consistent with a range of relevant Social Psychology theories - after all how does one belong to the group (in the example just mentioned, the married couple) when one does not know what is expected of the group members (as may be the case in non-traditional marriages)? For the most part, our grandparents and great-grandparents were borne out of morally directive tales where girls and boys, and women and men knew their place.
Those constructs of mind, however, are somewhat malleable.
Through a multitude of forces our morality and sensibilities have progressively evolved through the demands of changing times - which may include war, natural disaster and economic depression - and through the active influence of those previously mentioned outcasts - which may be consolidated within social movements, such as the Suffragettes or Emancipationists.
It is clear then that the stories upon which we are nurtured both reflect and direct our social identity, forging a shared morality and defining normative behaviours.
As such, clear cultural demarcations can be drawn based upon these differing emergent identities both within and between social groups such as the upper-class -v- the working-class or Russians -v- Venezuelans, respectively.
However, there is a dynamic which underpins this process and transcends borders of time and space: archetypes.
Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of Analytical Psychology states, "The archetype is a tendency to form such representations of a motif - representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern...
They are indeed an instinctive 'trend'".
Archetypes are then believed to be an innate aspect of our collective unconscious whereby we are all born, not as blank slates to be filled up by our environment, but as being already imprinted upon with a template of basic concepts.
While the number of archetypes is innumerable, Jung outlined five main archetypes:
- the Self - the regulating centre of the psyche and facilitator of individuation;
- the Shadow - the opposite of the Ego image, often containing qualities with which the Ego does not identify, but which it possesses nonetheless;
- the Anima - the feminine image of a man's psyche; or;
- the Animus - the masculine image in a woman's psyche; and
- the Persona - how we present to the world, which - acting like a mask - usually protects the Ego from negative images.
Indeed, 'story' is itself an archetype which evokes a shared expectation of what is to follow including a distinct beginning, middle and end, a protagonist and an antagonist.
If a story violates this pattern it is at risk of being rejected and thereby will not propagate itself in the hearts and minds of the people, consequently fading into non-existence.
To view the splendid illustrations depicting classic fairy tales, myths and legends from great artists of the Golden Age of Illustration, visit the Golden Age of Illustration Collection - an online display showing more than 5000 illustrations held by the 'Spirit of the Ages' Museum.