Jungian therapy, at least as I practice it, brings about an awareness that fantasy is the dominant force in a life. One learns in therapy that fantasy is a creative activity that is continually telling a person into now this story, now that one. When we examine these fantasies we discover that they reflect the great impersonal themes of mankind as represented in tragedy, epic, folktale, legend, and myth.
Fantasy in our view is the attempt of the psyche itself to remythologize consciousness; we try to further this activity by encouraging familiarity with myth and folktale. Soul-making goes hand in hand with deliteralizing consciousness and restoring its connection to mythic and metaphorical thought patterns. Rather than interpret the stories into concepts and rational explanations, we prefer to see conceptual explanations as secondary elaborations upon basic stories that are containers and givers of vitality. As Owen Barfield and Norman Brown have written, “Literalism is the enemy.” I would add: “Literalism is sickness.”
Whenever we are caught in a literal view, a literal belief, a literal statement, we have lost the imaginative metaphorical perspective to ourselves and our world. Story is prophylactic in that it presents itself always as “once upon a time,” as an “as if,” “make-believe” reality. It is the only mode of accounting or telling about that does not posit itself as real, true, factual, revealed, i.e., literal.
— A Note On Story, Inhuman Relations, UE 7