One way of understanding the work of the psychologist is to see them not primarily as a technician of symptoms or a manager of behaviours, but as a kind of drama critic. This is not a metaphor designed to trivialise psychological suffering. On the contrary, it allows us to approach the seriousness of psychic life with greater precision. Human beings do not merely live; they perform. They enter scenes already in progress, speak lines they did not write, and respond to characters whose presence they did not choose. Yet, they do so with varying degrees of awareness, freedom, and responsibility.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notion of the “suspension of disbelief” offers a useful starting point. In literary terms, it refers to the reader’s willingness to temporarily accept the premises of a fictional world in order to engage meaningfully with it. Without this suspension, the play collapses into artifice and the novel into implausibility. What is less often noticed is that ordinary life requires a similar act. Each person must accept, at least provisionally, the narrative conditions into which they are born: family structures, cultural myths, economic constraints, inherited expectations, and symbolic roles already occupied by others.
From a Jungian perspective, this is not simply social conditioning. It is also mythological. The psyche does not experience the world as neutral fact but as patterned meaning. We encounter parents not only as individuals but as archetypal figures. Authority appears as the Father or the Lawgiver. Nurture appears as the Mother. Conflict emerges as the Shadow. Possibility announces itself through the Trickster, the Guide, or the Stranger. Long before we reflect on these patterns, we are already living inside them.
The psychologist, in this sense, occupies a position analogous to the drama critic rather than the director. Their task is not to rewrite the script on the client’s behalf, nor to instruct them how to perform correctly according to some external standard. Instead, the psychologist watches closely, listens attentively, and develops an understanding of the narrative logic at work. They ask: what kind of story is this person living inside? What role do they appear to be performing? And crucially, are they aware that they are performing at all?
Jung was acutely aware that consciousness exists in degrees and in kinds. Not all actors on the psychic stage know they are actors. Many experience themselves as passive victims of events, buffeted by forces that appear arbitrary or hostile. In dramatic terms, these are characters who believe the play is simply happening to them. They do not see the archetypal patterns shaping their responses, nor the repetitive structures that keep returning in different guises. Their suffering is real, but it is compounded by a lack of reflective distance.
Others possess a partial awareness. They sense that certain situations recur, and that familiar emotional roles are being replayed, but they do not yet grasp the larger mythic context. They may know that they are “always the rescuer,” “always the outsider,” or “always the one who carries responsibility,” but this knowledge remains personal rather than symbolic. The role is recognised, yet still felt as fate rather than as a pattern that can be negotiated.
A smaller number reach a more explicit level of consciousness. They recognise that they are participants in a drama not of their own making, shaped by forces both historical and archetypal. This recognition does not grant mastery over the narrative, but it does introduce freedom of a particular kind. One cannot choose the myth one is born into, but one can begin to choose how consciously one inhabits the role assigned.
Here the psychologist’s critical function becomes most apparent. Like a drama critic, they are able to name the genre of the play. Is this a tragedy driven by unconscious sacrifice? A morality tale dominated by inflated ideals? A farce organised around avoidance and denial? Or a heroic narrative stalled at an early stage, unable to move beyond ordeal into transformation? Such naming is not diagnostic in the medical sense. It is orienting. It helps the performer understand the kind of story they are in.
Jung’s concept of individuation is central here. Individuation is not the invention of a new script, nor the achievement of autonomy in the simplistic sense of independence from others. It is the gradual differentiation of consciousness from unconscious identification with archetypal roles. To individuate is to realise that one is not identical with the hero, the martyr, the caretaker, or the rebel, even if one is required to play such parts for a time. The danger Jung repeatedly warned against was inflation: the moment when a person mistakes an archetypal role for their personal identity.
From the perspective of the drama critic, inflation occurs when the performer forgets that the role is larger than them. The hero believes he is the source of meaning rather than its temporary bearer. The saviour imagines that without them the drama would collapse. Conversely, deflation occurs when the performer feels crushed by the role, convinced that they are nothing more than its function. Both conditions involve a failure of critical distance.
The psychologist’s task, then, is to help restore perspective. This does not mean encouraging cynicism or detachment. The suspension of disbelief remains necessary. One must still play the part with sincerity. A life lived ironically or half-heartedly is psychologically impoverished. But the performer can be helped to hold the role symbolically rather than concretely. They can learn to say, in effect, “This is the role I am in, not the totality of who I am.”
This becomes particularly important because no one chooses the cast. Each person must interact with characters who are themselves largely unconscious of their roles. Parents, partners, colleagues, institutions, and cultures enact their own dramas, often colliding in ways that produce conflict and misunderstanding. The individual may find themselves cast as villain in someone else’s story, or as supporting character in a narrative that leaves no room for their own development. The psychologist does not arbitrate these conflicts as a judge. They illuminate the dramatic structure that makes them intelligible.
Seen this way, psychological work is less about correction and more about interpretation. The critic does not shout instructions from the stalls. They write in the margins, point out motifs, trace recurring themes, and draw attention to moments where the performance becomes rigid or compulsive. Over time, the performer may begin to sense where improvisation is possible, where the script allows variation, and where a different relation to the role might emerge.
Jung believed that modern people suffer not from a lack of information, but from a loss of myth. When life is experienced as meaningless sequence rather than symbolic drama, suffering becomes arbitrary and unbearable. The psychologist, as drama critic, does not impose a new myth. They help the individual recognise the myth already being lived, often unconsciously. In doing so, they return depth to experience without demanding belief in any literal narrative.
We usually talk of things as they ought to be and hate people who talk of things as they are; “you ought to,” “you should,” gives us peace of mind. If somebody tells us how we ought to do or say a thing, then reason is still ruling the world. Of course it doesn’t work; things take their own way and we are singularly impotent to change them. Nietzsche says, “Let the value of everything be determined anew by you.” But who is determining things? (Jung 1989, p.817).
To live consciously is not to step outside the play. It is to know that one is on stage, to understand something of the story’s shape, and to accept that the performance matters even though it is not entirely one’s own. The psychologist’s quiet authority lies in their capacity to hold this double vision: to take the drama seriously while never mistaking it for the whole of reality. In that sense, they model the very stance they invite in others, a disciplined suspension of disbelief that allows meaning to appear without becoming tyranny.
Jung, C. (1989). Nietzsche’s Zarathustra Part Two – notes of the seminar given in 1934 – 1939 (J. L. Jarrett, Ed. Vol. 2). Routledge.
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