On the nature of stories
Newsletter 20: May 6, 2025
It’s been a while since I posted but I’ve been busy in the background, posting my PhD thesis (Mating with the world) in a hidden section of The Mythopoetic Classroom. Yesterday I published the last chapter and the bibliography.
The thesis was the result of a lifelong struggle with questions that, in one way or another, have been with me – though at first subconsciously – since I was a child at boarding school, finding solace by reading (with a torch under the bed clothes, after the dormitory lights had been switched off) Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms.
The questions were (and still are): What is the nature of stories? Why do we tell them? Why are we attracted to them? Why do they matter?
I wrote the thesis at a time in my life when these questions were particularly urgent. I’d taken time out of school teaching, initially to tell a story about four remarkable primary school students in School Portrait. I’d also started working as a psychotherapist, listening and responding to others’ stories. And I was dipping my toes back into part-time secondary English teaching. Each of these stimulated questions about the nature of stories.
Why was the urge to tell the stories in School Portrait so compelling that I ditched my secure full-time job?
What was at the heart of the impulse of my psychotherapy clients to tell me about their current struggles, about their dreams and fantasies?
How should I encourage my secondary English students to respond to the stories told by novelists, poets and playwrights? What was the nature of these stories?
The writing of my thesis – Mating with the world – was my opportunity to wrestle with these questions. Serendipitously I had two outstanding supervisors: Professor David Russell (left) and Giles Clark (right). Giles was also my clinical supervisor.
Together we came up with what, at the time, felt like a risky but exciting approach. In my thesis I would tell a story (the fabricated story of a series of therapy sessions with an adolescent we called Joseph, with me as therapist and Giles as my supervisor), and at the same time I’d examine (with the help of relevant scholarship) the nature of three sets of stories:
The stories the client was telling me.
The stories I was telling myself and Giles in the supervision.
The stories Giles and the literature were telling me.
In the thesis, I concluded that the impulse to tell a story had two aspects.
The first was a bodily-felt agitation or need. The following is a passage from the thesis.
In its conception this impulse seems to have very little to do with other people. It seems to be selfish, a response to an entirely internal need. I need to make sense of something for myself. There is an unknown something, a chaotic or confusing something, and in its present undifferentiated form I cannot use it, talk about it, feel the power of it, feel myself energised by the aesthetics of it. I have an intuitive sense that it would be good to be able to do some of this, that if I could find the right words then some pressure or heaviness or muddiness or impotence or loneliness that I'm feeling might be alleviated. So I must speak, and unconsciously I begin to play with the chaotic elements, to muck around with them in exactly the same way a toddler does with a new combination of toys or blocks. (Play is not a preparation for living, but a continuing component of the creative life.) I've got to muck around, I've got to play, until I've formed some kind of relationship with the elements, or with the unknown world into which the elements have taken me. I've got to play until the chaos has been patterned in some way, until I've made the unknown more familiar. The alternative is to be frightened by the world and to be pushed back into myself, a particularly postmodern temptation in a world where God is dead and Gaia ailing.
Thus I begin the early drafts of this thesis by playing with the elements; creating a Joseph and investing the invention with the characteristics of many of my most challenging or unsettling clients, writing scenes which seemed to convey something of the atmosphere of actual interactions, and then superimposing a partly fictitious account of a supervision with Giles.
I muck around with scenes and dreams and thoughts and feelings until what initially felt dizzying, distanced and disempowering begins to take on some coherence and starts to lead to connections of many kinds: with my past, between my bodily agitations and certain thoughts, between apparently unconnected ideas, with philosophic and psychoanalytic traditions, and with current challenges.
Even in these earliest stages a story is a verb, attempting to do something, not a noun attempting to be something. This playing with disparate elements is an attempt to temporarily reconcile uneasy internal coalitions and rivalries as well as being an attempt to make more room for imprisoned and previously unrecognised internal beings like Hannibal [the character in a particularly chilling nightmare of mine].
So this bodily-felt agitation and impulse to bring to consciousness was the first aspect of story-telling.
The second was relational.
The telling of a story, I concluded, was always an attempt to form some kind of life-enhancing relationship with the world. I told stories to Giles to become a better therapist, to know more about Spinoza, and to deepen a valued relationship with Giles himself. Joseph told stories to me to feel some release from a solipsistic world in which he felt trapped, and to co-create some kind of less-constricting relationship with the world. I wrote a thesis to connect myself to ideas and traditions and two splendid supervisors.
The conclusions I came to in this thesis had a profound influence on the version of English teacher I went on to become. It was decidedly out-of-step with the official version implied by curriculum documents and assessment tasks. Instead of seeing texts as objects to be analysed, I saw them as agents attempting to unsettle and excite. Live bodies; not stable objects.
This shift in my approach was not always immediately appreciated. One of my students was heard at the lockers one day telling a mate: ‘Well, it’s English next lesson … Well, not English so much as 'Shannglish’. (If you’re interested in what Shannglish looked like in practice, many of my 2009 posts in the archive tell stories from my English classroom.)
Why have I tucked my PhD thesis away out of general sight?
Though the character of Joseph is a fiction, constructed both from life events experienced by a number of different clients and a healthy dose of literary licence, it felt appropriate to make it semi-private. So I’ve published the thesis here in a hidden section. If you would like to have a look, send me an email (steveshann47@gmail.com) and I’ll send you a link which will give you access.