Reclaiming the Myth

Course Description

Men searching for purpose online often find Jordan Peterson, offering a Jungian mythic structure that promises freedom and order through personal heroism. There's real power in that story. There are also major problems. No lone hero can address threats we currently face: AI, nuclear risk, ecological crisis. Danny Livingston asks what narrative therapy, skilled at deconstructing grand narratives, owes people who long for a brighter future. And whether it's time to build a better myth.

Instructor Information

Educational Goals

1. Develop an understanding of how mythic and heroic narrative structures shape the preferred stories of male clients, and the capacity to recognize when a client's organizing story has been drawn from individualist cultural sources, including online manosphere content.
2. Develop greater confidence in a decentered but influential therapeutic stance, including practices that invite clients into positions of expertise and treat the therapist-client hierarchy as something to work with intentionally rather than attempt to eliminate.
3. Develop a critical awareness of how a primarily deconstructive stance can inadvertently reinforce individualism, and an ongoing curiosity about the role therapists can play in building shared, collective meaning beyond the therapy room.

Measurable Learning Objectives

1. Participants will be able to describe the three stages of Joseph Campbell's monomyth (departure, initiation, and return) and the Jungian archetypes of chaos and order that underlie Jordan Peterson's use of it.
2. Participants will be able to distinguish two limitations of the individualist hero's journey when applied clinically: the interpretive problem, in which myths from collectivist cultures are read through a post-Protestant individualist lens, and the scale problem, in which individual heroism is offered as the answer to systemic threats.
3. Participants will be able to apply two of the following three narrative therapy practices with male clients whose preferred stories are organized around individualist heroic narratives: externalizing language that replaces combat metaphors, outsider witnessing practices such as a rotating client debrief, and relational questions that connect clients' preferred developments to the people in their lives.
4. Participants will be able to list four criteria for a new collective myth: that it is innovative rather than repeated (Ricoeur), able to withstand and absorb challenges from rival traditions (MacIntyre), permanently open to contestation (Butler), and dialogical (Taylor).

Outline with Main Points for Each Topic (including times)

1. 2:30–2:45 PM · Why Myth, and Why Peterson Warrants Serious Engagement — Obj 1 — 15 minutes

   • A clinical pattern: male clients organizing their preferred futures around the hero's journey, and why culture-level explanations alone felt incomplete
   • The path from manosphere content to Jordan Peterson, his academic credentials and audience reach, and the cost of professional dismissal over curiosity
   • Defining terms: myth as ideology in narrative form (Lincoln), and poststructuralism

2. 2:45–2:55 PM · Peterson's Theory of Change — Obj 1 — 10 minutes

   • Jungian archetypes of chaos and order, and Campbell's monomyth (departure, initiation, return) illustrated through the Enuma Elish
   • Peterson's thesis: meaning organized through maps drawn from traditional myth, dominance hierarchies presented as natural law, and the claim that abandoning traditional myth produced twentieth-century violence

3. 2:55–3:10 PM · Problems With the Hero's Journey — Obj 2 — 15 minutes

   • The interpretive problem: Exodus, Samson, Saul, and the Enuma Elish read in historical context; the post-Protestant individualist lens; authenticity as a modern construct
   • The scale problem: nuclear risk, climate change, and AI as collective action problems that no individual heroism can address

4. 3:10–3:20 PM · Narrative Therapy's Complicity — Obj 2, 4 — 10 minutes

   • Poststructuralism in historical context, and Michael White on questioning without relativism
   • How a primarily deconstructive stance may leave a vacuum filled by individualist, conspiratorial, and end-times myths

5. 3:20–3:40 PM · Clinical Practice: Alternatives to the Heroic Account — Obj 3 — 20 minutes

   • Re-authoring conversations with attention to the isolating effects of heroic accounts, and externalizing language that replaces combat metaphors
   • Outsider witnessing and definitional ceremony in a men's therapy group, including a rotating client debrief that invites clients into positions of expertise
   • The decentered but influential stance as hierarchical play: therapeutic charisma, therapy as ritual, relational questions, and plain language

6. 3:40–4:00 PM · Components of a New Myth and Collective Inquiry — Obj 1–4 — 20 minutes

   • Myth as a mobilizing force for collective action (Sorel), and why deconstruction alone is insufficient
   • Four criteria drawn from Ricoeur, MacIntyre, Butler, and Taylor
   • Participant questions and challenges, and applying the four criteria to clinical and community practice

Total instructional time: 15 + 10 + 15 + 10 + 20 + 20 = 90 minutes / 60 = 1.5 CE hours

Signing in and out

• Sign in at the door between 2:15 PM and 2:30 PM.
• Sign out and complete this session’s evaluation at the door when it ends at 4:00 PM.
• Sign-in, sign-out and the evaluation are not part of the 1.5 CE hours.

References

• Bacon, S. (2018). Practicing psychotherapy in constructed reality: Ritual, charisma, and enhanced client outcomes. Lexington Books.
• Butler, J. (1992). Contingent foundations: Feminism and the question of “postmodernism.” In J. Butler & J. W. Scott (Eds.), Feminists theorize the political (pp. 3–21). Routledge.
• Campbell, J. (2008). The hero with a thousand faces (3rd ed.). New World Library. (Original work published 1949)
• Han, B.-C. (2024). The crisis of narration (D. Steuer, Trans.). Polity Press. (Original work published 2023)
• Jung, C. G. (1968). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (H. Read, M. Fordham, & G. Adler, Eds.; R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed., Vol. 9, Pt. 1). Princeton University Press.
• Klein, N., & Taylor, A. (2026). End times fascism: And the fight for the living world. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Lincoln, B. (1999). Theorizing myth: Narrative, ideology, and scholarship. University of Chicago Press.
• MacIntyre, A. (1977). Epistemological crises, dramatic narrative and the philosophy of science. The Monist, 60(4), 453–472.
• Peterson, J. B. (1999). Maps of meaning: The architecture of belief. Routledge.
• Peterson, J. B. (2018). 12 rules for life: An antidote to chaos. Random House Canada.
• Ricoeur, P. (1991). Life in quest of narrative. In D. Wood (Ed.), On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and interpretation (pp. 20–33). Routledge.
• Sorel, G. (1999). Reflections on violence (J. Jennings, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1908)
• Taylor, C. (1992). The ethics of authenticity. Harvard University Press.
• White, M. (2000). Reflections on narrative practice: Essays and interviews. Dulwich Centre Publications.
• White, M. (2007). Maps of narrative practice. W. W. Norton.