Tabloid Magazines as Cultural Mythology and Jungian Archetypes

Introduction: The Surprising Reach of Tabloid Culture

Although very few of us would actually admit to it, many of us must be reading the tabloid press — publications like The National Enquirer sell hundreds of thousands of copies each day. This is true despite the fact that the average tabloid is full of articles that can in no way be considered news: elaborate stories of alien kidnapping, Elvis sightings, and stories about Princess Diana, who will remain tabloid fodder for decades to come.

Yet the proper way to consider the role that tabloids serve in our daily cultural life is not to dismiss them outright. They do not exist to tell us about the workings of Senate subcommittees. Rather, tabloids exist to provide us with insights into important cultural issues. We turn to tabloids to read about Princess Diana not because we expect statistics about the class structure of England, but because we want to come to a better understanding of what it means to be beautiful, of how fate and destiny touch our lives, and of what it means for birth to carry more weight than accomplishment.

Tabloids as Mirrors of Cultural Anxiety

Tabloids tell us, at least to some extent, what it is that we are concerned about as a culture. We fear aliens because part of the human psyche is designed to fear that which is different — and aliens are about as different as one can imagine. We long for stories about the visitations of angels because we desperately want to believe that there are creatures watching over us.

In this sense, the content of tabloids is not arbitrary. Each recurring subject — the extraterrestrial, the miraculous, the undying celebrity — maps onto a recognizable human anxiety or aspiration. The stories may be fantastical, but the emotional needs they address are entirely real.

The Campfire Tradition: Tabloids as Modern Myth-Telling

Tabloids have in many ways taken over the storytelling role of our culture — a role once held by tale-spinners sitting around campfires. These stories are not meant to be believed, or at least not at the level of surface details. But they are meant to be truthful in some deeper sense. They illuminate what Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called archetypes: recurring symbolic figures and patterns embedded in the human unconscious.

Jung's Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

Jung was fascinated by the ways in which the unconscious mind could provide links beyond the individual. In his 1912 work Psychology of the Unconscious, he explored the connections between the stories of living people and ancient myths. Jung argued that our stories provide a way in which we can recapture the common experiences of all of humanity and thereby gain from the wisdom accumulated across generations.

Jung constantly looked to non-Western and past cultures in an attempt to discover what ideas we hold in common with all other humans, and found that we do indeed share a great deal. The knowledge that our dreams connect us to the rest of humanity should instill a sense of power, because it reminds us that we are not alone in the world and that whatever problems we face have been faced — and surmounted — by others before us.

Jung believed that all creation stories were generated from these archetypes. He spent years studying different tribes in Africa, carefully selecting tribes that had never been in contact with one another. What he found was that all of the tribes had creation stories and religious beliefs. After examining these stories, he discovered that they all followed the same fundamental plot line. Characters such as the hero, God, the demon, the sun, and the moon appeared in all of them — the only differences were the names given to these figures. He believed that we use both our personal unconscious (memories unique to the individual) and the collective unconscious (archetypes we all share) to confront and overcome life's challenges.

We see this same similarity of plot lines in tabloid stories from one week to the next. What Jung found in his analysis of stories told around the world was that narratives with very different characters and surface details were fundamentally similar in terms of the psychological purposes they served.

Conclusion: A Legitimate Place in Human Society

This is not, however, what tabloids do. Tabloids are not soothsayers — they are storytellers, and there is a place in human society for the illumination that comes through stories just as there is a place for the illumination that comes through truth. Which is why there is plenty of intellectual and cultural room for both newspapers and tabloids.

So next time you catch a headline about Martians invading, don't just laugh. Ask yourself what archetypal question, at the heart of essential human nature, is being answered by speculating about what lies beyond the boundaries of our personal experience.

References

Barton, A. (1993). Three worlds of theory: An existential-phenomenological study of the therapies of Freud, Jung and Rogers. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Croteau, D., & Hoynes, H. (1997). Media/society: Industries, images, and audiences. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.