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Language, myth and story: how we use metaphorical language to communicate ideas to each other and through time

Pat Williams

Once language emerged, culture joined genes as an agent of human evolution. Accumulated knowledge and ideas could be passed from brain to brain in containers such as myth, legend and story. Whilst even single words or phrases carry layers of meaning within themselves (the same words have different effects on differently prepared minds), 'real' stories can have at their core patterns with potential for multifaceted impacts and solutions, and can indicate the existence, in any given epoch, of realities outside the consensus. It's almost as if story structure were the DNA of human cultures.

Pat Williams was founder-director of the College of Storytellers and is a writer and psychotherapist. She is on the educational board of the European Therapy Studies Institute, has for 30 years been a consultant on psychology and human belief systems and is currently giving workshops in the therapeutic use of stories to health and social workers around the country. She is co-author, with Douglas Hill, of an internationally best-selling encyclopaedia on human belief, The Supernatural. Another of her books was chosen by U.S. Psychology Today as its Book Club choice, alternate with Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. Her film, The Fanatics, won a Screenwriters' Guild Award and is in the National Film Archive. She also wrote the original book and the lyrics for the celebrated South African musical, King Kong. As a broadcaster, she was chairman of a number of BBC series of books programmes, and also chairman of Speculations, Radio 3's series on millennial ideas.

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