Fantasy Does Not Escape Reality, It Explains It

This past friday, I gave a lecture with The Higher Thought Institute and we discussed my non-fiction book A Jungian Analysis of Toxic Modern Society: Fighting the Culture of Loneliness. Over a three hour lecture with Q+A, we talked about how modern society has a lot of features that contribute to the rising mental illness that Western, industrialized nations have seen over the last 100 years. Loneliness, lack of identity, disconnection from nature and

Loneliness, lack of identity, disconnection from nature and community, and many other features have contributed. This is a major problem I see everyday—depression, self-harm, addictions, and anxiety disorders have all gotten worse, and while we as mental health providers have done a great job at identifying the biological and individual psychological contributors to these conditions, I think we’ve done a much poorer job identifying the cultural contributors to them. When compared to hunter-gatherers, for example, we are much more depressed, anxious, addicted, and prone to self-harm. Thus, even though modern society has brought with it improvements in technology and medicine, we seem to have made a devil’s bargain for it in terms of worsening mental health.

But one area that has not neglected to identify this issue is in our fiction. Fiction acts like the dreams of an individual—it shows us the big picture, like cultural factors that are making us mentally ill, but it often uses symbols and metaphors to do it. I always say, before there were mental health professionals, there were storytellers!

This has been going on for a long time. Take for example, Rod Serling’s famous Twilight Zone series. That show tackled major social issues using the science-fiction and fantasy format. The episode “the Monsters are Due on Maple Street” was a fierce criticism of McCarthyism and Cold War hysteria, which Serling never would have gotten through the right-wing censors of his day had he not used the method of metaphor and symbol that is the bread and butter of SFF fiction. Given that they thought of SFF as “frivolous escapism”, they did not pay attention to what Serling was doing. The rest is history.

Thus, with this and many other examples, we can see that fantasy does not escape reality—it helps us make sense of reality by explaining it in metaphors and symbols.

Special note to PAID subscribers on Substack—contact me individually and I will send you my lecture notes for this past talk at the Higher Thought Institute, and get special insights into how I used these facts about fantasy to construct The Raven’s Tale.

Never stop dreaming,

EG