Patricia Berry considers that narrative as such cannot help but reflect the ego’s concerns, because narrative is essentially the genre of the hero archetype: “The most important difficulty with narrative: it tends to become the ego’s trip. The hero has a way of finding himself in the midst of any story. He can turn anything into a parable of a way to make it and stay on top. The continuity in a story becomes his ongoing heroic movement.” A similar thought has been put succinctly in Roger Fowler’s dictionary: “The narrative without a hero remains a critical fiction.” If we are going to tell tales in narrative form we are going to come out with ego theory. Berry implies that the genre of narrative itself determines the plot by which we form our case history and understand it.
the examples of the heroic ego and the picaresque … the abstractions of senex consciousness where we move away from narrative … an emphasis upon reductions, either downward to castration anxiety, omnipotence fantasy, primal scene, etc., or upward to wholeness, self, fourfoldedness … images of a dream, instead of being primary and irreducible as Jung’s own theory itself states, become representations of something more abstract … not that precise image and its metaphorical implications, but is a representation of a nonrepresentational