A study of spontaneous narrative formation: coronavirus and narratives of doom

Abstract

Is the frequently heard and seemingly innocent statement that the coronavirus was ‘sent by Mother Nature to teach us a lesson,’ evidence of an unconscious narrative that is driven by the fear and grief engendered by the pandemic? The idiom ‘teach us a lesson’ suggests that Mother Earth is angry with us and further, that the archetype of divine punishment – apocalypse – has been activated in the collective unconscious. This may be a dangerous time for the world psyche because an archetype, as objective pattern as well as a ‘dynamic living agency,’ can influence our emotions and behaviors. History has shown the devastation a powerfully activated negative archetype can engender. Can analytical psychology contribute to easing psychological suffering caused by the irrational fear of the end of the world? We suggest C.G Jung’s ‘transcendent function’ can be invoked to spontaneously produce a new unifying, and therefore healing symbol.

Keywords:

• archetype
• coronavirus
• Jung
• analytical psychology
• fear
• trauma
• narrative

One often hears or reads on social media that the virus was ‘sent by Mother Nature to teach us a lesson.’ Is this seemingly innocent statement part of a larger unconscious narrative, or in other words, a spontaneously arising story created by the innate myth-making function of the human psyche, struggling to ‘explain’ why such a devastating event is happening? The statement seems to express two emotions. One is forlorn frustration and a second is anger and indignation towards ‘people who are ruining the planet,’ and seems to suggest that Mother Nature is punishing us humans. To be ‘taught a lesson’ is a common idiom, defined by American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms as:

Punish in order to prevent a recurrence of bad behavior. For example, Timmy set the wastebasket on fire; that should teach him a lesson about playing with matches. This term uses lesson in the sense of ‘a punishment or rebuke’. (Ammer 2003)

Even the Dalai Lama, though in a more gentle tone, referred to the pandemic as Mother Earth wanting to teach us something. The headline of an article in the Deccan Herald read, ‘Coronavirus, … mother Earth’s lesson to human beings in universal responsibility: Dalai Lama' (2020, italics added).

Naturally, the crux of this discussion is the use of the term Mother Nature, and my suggestion that implying Mother nature may be punishing and angry is a significant change in the primary narrative of the last 30–40 years. It is not possible in the scope of this short paper to adequately demonstrate what that narrative has been but we can provide a simple characterization: she has been nearly universally portrayed as either loving and abundantly generous, or as weak, needing to be saved by us humans. An example is the hugely impactful campaigns of the budding environmental activism groups in the 1970s. In their on-line article, the Environmental Justice History Lab, of the University of Michigan History Department (2022) describes the exploding ecology movement and national adoption of Earth Day in 1972. The Give Earth a Chance: Environmental Activism movement released a poster that captured the public’s imagination: a simple black and white depiction of the planet earth as seen from space with underneath the words, ‘LOVE YOUR MOTHER.’ That poster and similar messages became wildly popular and spread like wildfire. Another example is the popular children’s song written by Pam Minor (2019) for Earth Day that states, ‘Let’s love our Mother Earth, she’s got to last forever; Mother Earth let’s take good care of her. To bring us joy and mirth, She’s got to last a long long time.’ Other posters stated, ‘Love your Mother, she’s the only one you’ve got.’ These imply vulnerability, that Mother Nature, synonymous with Mother Earth, requires our protection in order to survive! Quite the opposite of the current growing narrative that she is all powerful, like other vengeful deities, and is punishing us with the coronavirus for our sins against her. In my opinion, this attitude remains predominant. Employing the most primitive of tools of investigation, one can simply do a Google search of the term Mother Nature and look at the images that are generated. One will see page after page of green, flowery, gently feminine, with loving gestures, depictions. Viewing many pages, I could not find a single image of a cruel, angry or vengeful goddess.

From the point of view of the analytical psychology of C.G. Jung, we ask the question: has the fear and grief engendered by the pandemic activated in the collective unconscious the archetype of divine punishment – apocalypse – that in turn drives a narrative of an angry Mother Earth? According to Jung already in 1957 (Jung 1964, 247), and more recently Edward Edinger (1999) and Richard Stein (2016), the apocalypse archetype was already highly activated before the coronavirus pandemic, and it appears now to be even more so. By ‘activated,’ we mean simply either a significantly increased number of people explicitly believe an apocalypse is coming, and/or a significantly increased degree of fascination in popular culture. An example would be the ever-growing craze about ‘all things zombie’, and in particular the highly popular television series, ‘The Living Dead.’ We know a central theme of the Apocalypse in the book of Revelations is the resurrection of the dead. I believe that the visual impact of the ubiquitous zombies, seen everywhere, social media, etc., is effectively a re-creation of scenes from religious art, such as Michelangelo’s ‘The Last Judgement’,¹ where the dead push up and crawl out from under their gravestones.

If we accept that a significant number of people, either unconsciously or intuitively, believe an apocalypse is approaching, why would people fall prey to and even embrace such a horrific narrative? The reasons why people will hold firmly to irrational beliefs has been extensively studied in sociology, social- and many other branches of psychology. Addressing this huge topic is naturally beyond the scope of this short paper, but I want to include here much simplified theories from both the sociological and psychodynamic fields.

In his epidemiological model for studying belief systems (‘representations’), Dan Sperber implies that without asking the question, ‘why do people believe that,’ one cannot truly understand human culture. He states, ‘So, to explain culture is to answer the following question: why are some representations more successful in a human population, more contagious, more “catching” than others?’ (1985, 74). One possible answer in the social psychology literature seems to me especially relevant to our apocalypse theme. People may adopt a particular belief system when it helps them feel more secure in the world and according to Melvin Lerner’s ‘just world theory’, in order to feel safe, some ‘people need to maintain the functional belief that the world is a just, fair, and nonrandom place where people get what they deserve’ (Lerner 1980; Callan et al. 2014, 119).

In addition to the resurrection of the dead, the Apocalypse myth promises that ultimate justice will be meted out on the world; that bad people will be permanently separated from the good people. For a person facing the pandemic’s mass destruction of life and entire economies, who yearns to believe in a just world, a natural reaction would be to desperately seek explanations showing the pandemic to be part of a larger system based on justice, making the apocalypse narrative powerfully compelling.

From a different view, we could say that psychodynamic psychology and neuroscience have delineated, for the individual, the psychological and physiological mechanisms that drive the need to believe in a just world. For example, we now understand that fear and trauma dramatically affect the brain and can alter cognitive processes. Recent years have seen an explosive growth in research and the subsequent understanding of these neuro-psychological changes (van der Kolk 2015; Dunlea 2019). Both neuroscience and psychology are in large agreement: using the simplest language possible, chronic stress, fear and trauma, cause thinking to become exaggeratedly black and white, while calm, nuanced reflection and rationality are nearly impossible. Donald Kalsched, an internationally recognized expert on the psychodynamics of trauma, describes our response to the pandemic in this way:

[Our] imagination can work either ‘for’ or ‘against’ us as we struggle to adapt to an outer crisis such as we are facing in the worldwide Pandemic we call Covid-19. As Depth Psychology has taught us, imagination is how we make meaning out of our experience, and when experience becomes ‘too big’ or terrifying for us to organize in our customary ways, the imagination gives us archetypal stories and lenses through which to see our experience. These ‘categories of understanding’ (Kant) do not always help us to integrate our experience because they are ‘primitive’ binary, totalistic structures and they tend to turn us all into heroes or villains, victims or perpetrators. (Kalsched 2020, 3)

Many fear-driven thoughts about the coronavirus are of course conscious but the powerful emotional content, and the degree to which this content is driven by very compelling mythological stories – that we say are shaped by archetypal organizing principles in the psyche – are not consciously perceived and understood by the individual. The narratives formed by this fear-induced psychology remain unfortunately out of sight and because they are not available for rational reflection on their meaning, they are all the more impactful. Large swathes of societies just ‘know’, at the level of intuition, that the narratives are TRUE.

I believe this is a dangerous time for the world psyche. In Archetype of the Apocalypse, Edward Edinger defines archetype in agreement with C.G. Jung as both an objective pattern and a ‘dynamic living agency … with intentionality and some semblance of consciousness’ (Edinger 1999, 2, italics added,). Thus, an activated archetype stimulates not only emotional fantasies, but can take complete possession of a person’s body and mind, to be acted out in behaviors. We have seen in modern history – in the extreme ideologies of the twentieth century for example – what powerfully activated archetypes can do to a society.

An important question is whether this narrative of doom, arising from the archetype of a wrathful God, will cause significant portions of society to be convinced that the end of our world is at hand? And if so, what types of emotions and behaviors could that terrifying scenario engender? A worse danger, from my point of view, is that the current psychological burden of terror, confusion and helplessness could create a craving for the end to come – to put an end to the suffering. In private conversations, I’ve been told, ‘I can’t stand waiting any longer to see if the world is going to break down into total chaos and wars. So I think, just bring it on – NOW!’ What would happen if significant numbers of people were gripped by an extreme version of this destructive emotion and were to compulsively act it out? Is it possible that we could again witness the unthinkable evil that a society is capable of when, infected by powerful negatively charged archetypal energies, it is swept up into a whirlwind of catastrophic self-destruction?

So what can be done to counteract such a narrative? Would it be possible to somehow help our society find a new narrative that subsumes the current world-shattering of an apocalypse? I don’t suggest here a new story that dismisses the negative one. I mean a narrative that begins with the negative one, but brings in new information, takes a view that is broader than the fear-driven black and white version of the world. At best it would lessen fear and increase an understanding of events (both negative and positive) as being part of a larger, stabilizing world view, and so help people calm down and feel safer in the world.

For individuals, we know that relief from debilitating psychic tension can be found when C.G. Jung’s ‘transcendent function’ is invoked (Jung 1970, 81). When an internal conflict – for example trying to decide whether or not to end a marriage – can be tolerated without acting out the ‘yes’ or the ‘no’ options, and both are held together in awareness, the psyche can spontaneously produce a new symbol, that points to a new solution: an as yet unknown third possibility that unifies and contains within itself the opposite scenarios. But how could this be encouraged in the collective psyche, in other words, at the level of our entire society?

Historically, at the start of the first millennium, mystery religions such as the Mithraic Mysteries, Gnosticism and Christianity, spawned radically new unifying symbols that spread like wildfire, transforming entire societies (Ulansey 2012). Is it possible that our highly polarized societies are again ready to embrace and be transformed by new unifying symbols? Should we, as analytical psychologists, focus on supporting individuals to ‘hold the tension of the opposites’, in the hope they experience transformative revelations that soften the psychological suffering caused by living within the collective state of severe tension between opposites, severe polarization?

We could then hope that individuals to whom a numinous unifying symbol is revealed, would foster their vision, keep it alive and share it with those around them. Then perhaps these symbols could plant themselves and grow in the collective psyche, with each person’s experience acting like a ‘seed crystal’ for the society at large. In chemistry, minerals dissolved in water are sometimes reluctant to start forming crystals and ‘fall out’ of their dissolved state – even when the solution is ‘super-saturated’ with the mineral. In order to kick-start the process, a tiny seed crystal is dropped into the water and suddenly a flurry of crystals appear and fall to the bottom like so much snow.

What could crystallize and take form in the collective psyche is naturally a great mystery, but perhaps the alchemists have foreseen its essence in their search for the unus mundus. In her book, Towards an Ecopsychotherapy, ecopsychologist and Jungian analyst Mary-Jayne Rust gives a moving description of the transformative experience of unus mundus that can occur during psychotherapy in the outdoors:

Synchronicities happen in abundance outdoors … Jung defines synchronicity as two things coming together in time, simultaneously, which are connected through meaning, not through cause and effect. Such moments offer a portal into another way of seeing the world where we have an experience that everything and everyone is in continuous dynamic relationship within a unified reality from which everything emerges and to which everything returns. Jung and Pauli referred to this matrix as unus mundus, Latin for ‘one world’. In this way, synchronicity is like an intervention of grace offering an experience of wholeness. (Rust 2020, 11, italics added)

Perhaps Rust is pointing to a way to invoke the transcendent function, where our inner life can be released from the painful polarized state of ‘me against a dangerous, cruel and unfair world’. Perhaps psychotherapeutic engagement with nature can help us towards a new way of being in our modern world, to the unus mundus ‘experience of wholeness’, wherein the inner world is no longer dominated by the tension and fear the coronavirus pandemic, and all the other shocking horrifying events that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have brought. Perhaps this seems naive, but in any case, it seems to me a very good place to begin the exploration.

In conclusion, this paper has examined how dangerous and frightening circumstances in the world, especially at a global level, can stimulate the myth-making aspect of human psychology to interpret these events into an archetypal doomsday story. According to C.G. Jung, the ‘mythopoeic’ – or myth-making – function serves to give meaning and emotional depth to human experience. But unfortunately, when a myth is created in response to a world-shaking tragedy such as the COVID-19 pandemic, it is only natural that, instead of that ‘meaning’ being inspirational or comforting, it is dominated by the negative and frightening pole of an archetype. In this case, we can see the archetype to be world transformation, with the negative pole being an apocalypse.

The theme of this conference has been ‘narratives in times of radical transformation’. The pandemic has clearly brought a radical transformation of how we humans understand our world. It has impacted our daily lives, pushing fear and uncertainty to a previously unimaginable level – for everyone. Even those who understood that such a pandemic was a likely future event (van den Berg-Cook 2021), must have felt shaken by the grim reality of the coronavirus pandemic. This paper attempts to demonstrate that the radical transformation brought by the pandemic has profoundly affected our societies’ psychological state, producing a very negative spontaneous narrative of, among others, impending apocalyptic doom.

This paper also suggests an approach based on archetypal psychology for helping to transform our societies’ negative myth into a more positive form of ‘world transformation’. Individuals working with their transcendent function, as defined by C.G. Jung (1970, 81–83), may have a personal ‘experience of wholeness’ that brings a new understanding of our world as an unus mundus, where ‘everything and everyone is in continuous dynamic relationship within a unified reality from which everything emerges and to which everything returns’ (Rust 2020). In such a story, we can, in inspired moments, feel integral with and contained in the natural universe. Extremes of feeling a victim of the virus and facing the destruction of our world could melt away when we feel ourselves at one with both the dangers and the abundance of ‘Mother Nature’.

This paper, and the convictions that I have expressed, are not based on classical social science research. Because I am a doctor of psychology with extensive specialization in the analytical psychology of C.G. Jung, my arguments are based on those methods of observing social and individual psychological trends, which I find to be a very powerful approach to understanding narratives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nancy van den Berg-Cook

Dr. van den Berg-Cook is a certified Jungian psychoanalyst (International Association for Analytical Psychology) and clinical psychologist (Psy.D.) in private practice in the Netherlands for 25 years. She publishes and teaches internationally specialising in clinical applications of Jungian psychology and cultural psychology in the form of society-wide archetypal influences and trends. In her first career she is a Ph.D. (University of California Berkeley) bio-medical research scientist in the field of Metabolism and Nutrition.

Notes

1 Fresco in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican City, Rome, dated 1536–1541.