Abstract
The article analyses psychologically the personal myth phenomenon and the possibilities of its psychotherapeutic use. The essential features of the myth, associated with the emergence of psychological effects, relevant to the goals of psychological assistance were identified. They include: an initial appearance of characters, images, events; miraculousness because any restriction can be lifted under certain conditions; representation of the mythical characters as a role model; the myth serving as a priori streamliner for perception. Immersion of consciousness into the mythological reality is associated with important therapeutic mechanisms, such as: hope instilling, universality of experiences, existential factors; life event perception can loss its literalness. We have shown that the search for personal developmental guidelines and triggering the appropriate motivational mechanisms are ensured mostly due to the mainstreaming of the pre-logic, mythological level of consciousness responsible for a person’s creativity. A personal myth is defined as a system of core personal meanings formed by synthesizing the content of cultural and social myths with personal experiences, manifested and transformed through narratives and acting as a sensual perspective on the person’s life project. The main functions of personal myths are: socio-adaptive, meaning-forming, regulatory, axiological and integrative. We have shown that, in the psycholinguistic aspect, a personal myth is a text that serves as a mechanism of interactions between generalized cultural meanings and core personal meanings. The hypothesis has been developed that specific discourse analysis methods correspond to the content of psychotherapeutic interactions; these methods allow us to retain a client’s meaningfull integrity. Step-by-step tasks were highlighted for work with a client’s personal mythology. These are: finding a principle that organizes a client’s subjective experiences and revealing the personal myth through deconstruction of the client’s story text; assessing the constructiveness/destructiveness of its actual impact on the client’s life; helping the client to rethink the key elements of their personal myth and to choose together with them the mythological constructions corresponding to their actual problem; helping the client build practical life strategies on the basis of the rethought personal myth; supporting the implementation of these strategies.
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