Ever since the dawn of time, human beings have had a natural urge to tell stories. Even if the

prehistoric man did not know how to write, he felt the necessity to express artistically, in a unique

symbolic manner – by drawing pictures on caves. Archeologists have been able to tell us entire

stories extrapolated from those cave drawings, which could lead to general opinion that human

beings have always been inclined to create art and that storytelling, as a form of narrative, only

evolved during thousands of years of human history. Homo sapiens, as a social being, feels the

need to talk about his everyday life, to leave a record of his time in any way that is available

during his lifetime. From symbols in pictures on cave walls, the human race continued to

progress in telling stories which were retold from one generation to another. From that ancient

time until today, human beings share what Karl Gustav Jung, the famous psychoanalyst, called

‘collective unconscious’.

He claims:

“… The unconscious contains, as it were, two layers: the personal and the collective. The personal layer ends at the earliest memories of infancy, but the collective layer comprises the preinfantile period, that is, the residues of ancestral life. Whereas the memory-images of the personal unconscious are, as it were, filled out, because they are images personally experienced by the individual, the archetypes of the collective unconscious are not filled out because they are forms not personally experienced. When, on the other hand, psychic energy regresses, going beyond even the period of early infancy, and breaks into the legacy of ancestral life, the mythological images are awakened: these are the archetypes. An interior spiritual world whose existence we never suspected opens out and displays contents that seem to stand in sharpest contrast to all our former ideas.”1

Therefore, our collective unconscious allows us to connect with our ancestors in the most

profound way – we are able to share their beliefs, morals, even stories they told. Even though the

human kind has evolved, it is still obvious that these stories repeat themselves. Ancient peoples

talked about everyday life, the weather conditions and their effect on their crops, rites of passage

for young males in the community, but also about mysteries that surrounded them and how to

explain the inexplicable: illness, hunger, changes in the sky, etc. In order to explain the forces

1 Psychological Types (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 6)

they could not understand, storytellers turned to myth, a very powerful means to rationalize the

mysterious occurrences. Today, and throughout history as well, even though people have had a

different and technologically improved life, they have always reflected on the same topics.

Solutions for inexplicable phenomena have always been similar – religion replaced mythology

and science, though it has always been present even in the small form of a sundial, improved a

lot. When it comes to storytelling, from oral histories, people advanced to learning how to read

and write. With the invention of the printing press, reading materials became much more

accessible to common people who liked to read. It would be hard not to notice that the subject

matter of oral histories of ancient peoples is similar to what was written by famous writers.

Shakespeare, for example, also incorporated elements of weather conditions as crucial to some of

his work, the mystical phenomena, chaos and natural order. Nowadays, with the emergence of the

silver screen, audience is still attracted to films about ordinary people, natural disasters and the

mysteries of the unknown. Collective unconscious lives in all human beings and empowers us to

tell stories as fundamental part of our lives.