Technologized Myths
In every age, human beings have told stories to make sense of suffering. Before we had brain scans and autonomic diagrams, we had underworlds, tempests, gods of fate, and trickster spirits. We spoke of descent and return, exile and homecoming, curse and blessing. These stories were not primitive attempts at science; they were maps of lived experience. They explained why we tremble, why we rage, why we go numb. They offered dignity in the face of forces that felt larger than the individual will.
Modern psychology imagines itself as something different. It speaks in the language of circuits, neurotransmitters, and adaptive systems. It prefers graphs to myths and mechanisms to metaphors. And yet, if we look closely, many of our most influential psychological frameworks function much like the old stories did. They are what we might call technologized myths: narratives clothed in neuroscience, performing ancient psychological work.
Take Polyvagal Theory. Framed in the language of autonomic pathways and evolutionary neurobiology, it describes a hierarchy of states: social engagement, mobilization, shutdown. It gives names to experiences many trauma survivors know intimately—the warmth of connection, the surge of fight-or-flight, the heavy descent into collapse. Whether every neuroanatomical claim holds up under scrutiny is a matter for researchers to debate. But culturally and clinically, the theory has spread because it offers something myth has always offered: a compassionate map. It tells us that shutdown is not moral failure but an ancient survival response. That hypervigilance is not madness but mobilized protection. That the longing for safety is biologically grounded, not childish dependency. In this way, it protects dignity. It explains suffering without reducing the sufferer to weakness or defect. It provides a path of movement—toward regulation, toward connection—without promising perfection. In mythic terms, it narrates descent and return.
The same can be said of Freud’s libido theory. Though couched in the scientific aspirations of early psychoanalysis, it functioned as a myth of energy and repression, of hidden forces shaping conscious life. Jung’s archetypes operate similarly. Whatever one thinks of their empirical status, they provide an imaginal vocabulary for recurring human patterns—the hero, the shadow, the mother, the trickster. Attachment theory, too, carries mythic elements: the secure base, the rupture, the repair. It is a story of exile and homecoming told through developmental research.
The question, then, may not be whether these theories are literally correct in every mechanistic detail. Scientific inquiry rightly refines, critiques, and sometimes overturns claims. But on the psychological and cultural level, another question presses forward: Does this framework illuminate experience without constricting it? A myth becomes dangerous when it hardens into dogma—when it insists that every human complexity can be reduced to a single pathway, hormone, or explanatory key. When the language that once dignified suffering begins to flatten it. When metaphor is mistaken for machinery. The nervous system becomes a character in a story rather than a dynamic and multifaceted reality. The map becomes the territory.
Yet abandoning these frameworks entirely would also mean abandoning the symbolic power they carry. Human beings seem to require maps. We need orienting narratives that make pain intelligible and that allow us to imagine movement. A theory that helps someone understand their freeze response as protective rather than shameful is doing mythic work. It is restoring honor to a part of the psyche that once felt defective. To call something a contemporary myth is not to dismiss it. It is to place it in a larger lineage of meaning-making. It is to acknowledge that science, too, participates in the symbolic imagination of its time. Our age speaks in the idiom of technology and biology. We translate gods into neurotransmitters and underworlds into vagal shutdown. But the psychological function remains strikingly similar.
Perhaps the task, then, is not to choose between science and myth, but to hold scientific theories with imaginal humility. To use them as lenses rather than prisons. To let them offer maps without mistaking them for the whole terrain. To ask: Is this helping us see more of human experience, or less? When a theory expands compassion, preserves complexity, and allows movement, it is serving life. When it narrows, reduces, or moralizes, it has slipped from myth into ideology. The work—clinical, cultural, personal—is to keep our maps alive, flexible, and in service of the dignity of the soul.
