Discovering One's Personal Myth

It’s graduation season, which means it’s time for that unique oratorical offering, the commencement address. As far as I know, no Jungian analyst has ever been asked to give a graduation speech at an American college. Nevertheless, I have thoughts to share with the class of 2026. Following is what I would say if I were speaking to today’s graduates:

Distinguished faculty, parents, and of course, graduates, I am honored to stand before you today and share this momentous occasion with you.

A little more than four years ago, most of you were readying yourself for the journey you have just completed. Parents, guidance counselors, and teachers shepherded you through the process of visiting and choosing colleges, studying for the SATs, and filling out applications. The community around you provided attentive support to launch you from the safe harbor of high school onto the wide seas of college.

Starting from the moment you were admitted, this school welcomed you, preparing you for your voyage. When you got to campus, you were offered advisors and mentors. Every effort was made to ease your transition as you set sail.

Today, you have completed that journey. This is a time for celebration, for looking back and reflecting on who you were then, and how far you’ve come. It’s a time to appreciate the effort that it took to get here, and the courage and resilience that younger you mustered as you rose to meet the challenges – personal and academic – that you’ve faced.

I’m thrilled to be here today to wish you a hearty congratulations, but I’m also glad to be here because there are some words I would like to share with you that I think are rarely spoken at this juncture. For while we offered you all kinds of help in making the shift to college, we have precious little to offer you as you make the next momentous step. Having completed this important passage, many of you will find yourselves spit out unceremoniously on the far shore, alone and without guidance.

And this next transition is arguably a much bigger one than the last. It’s not just a transition from being a student to being a worker, or from being an adolescent to an adult. For many of you, the next several years will be the first vertiginous confrontation with the need to find meaning and purpose.

Let me share a personal story. I faced this first steep drop off at the end of my junior year. Watching my friends in the class above me cross the line, I saw what I was headed for in one year’s time – and hit a wall. On the surface, the problem was mundane. I had – unsurprisingly – completely underestimated what it would take to move out of my apartment and found myself facing a deadline I couldn’t possibly meet. As I made yet another trip to the store to buy boxes for packing, I found myself thinking something like the following: I’m spending money to buy boxes to put my stuff in. Soon, I will need a job so that I can pay for the stuff and the boxes to put it in. Is that what this is all for? Am I here to work to make money to buy boxes to put stuff in?

I had slipped into a deep, psychospiritual crevasse, wherein I became alienated from any sense of meaning. Contemplating the life ahead of me and the terrifying requirement to do something with it, I was heartsick. I became briefly paralyzed by existential emptiness and dread. Perhaps a few of you have already faced such a moment. Some of you may have such an experience soon. If you are on your way to graduate school or have a job waiting for you, you may have succeeded in postponing such a reckoning with your destiny, but it likely awaits you at some point.

When that time comes, what you learned in engineering, biology, or chemistry probably won’t be of much use, but something that you learned in English, art history, philosophy, comparative religion, or classics may actually save you. For this moment that you are soon to face is not something that is unique to your generation, or mine, or even modernity. It is a universal human passage.

From Telemachus to Hamlet, from Siddartha to Holden Caulfield, young men and women have had to create a life of meaning for themselves and reckon with the legacy bequeathed them by their forebears. It’s such a common theme in literature that it has its own category – the coming of age novel.

Whether it’s Philip Carey from Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Theo from Tartt’s The Goldfinch, Selin from Batuman’s The Idiot, or Emil Sinclair from Hesse’s Demian, the heroes and heroines of the bildungsroman suffer because the truths they were offered by parents and culture are found to be inadequate guides when it comes to actually figuring out how to make a life for oneself. “It is an illusion that youth is happy,” wrote Somerset Maugham, “an illusion of those who have lost it but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded.”1

The answers we gave you to questions you never asked may feel hollow and false. But it isn’t because we deceived you. It’s because you cannot live your life according to the stories given to you by your parents and teachers. As you go out into the world, each of you must find your personal myth, a central narrative unique to you that helps you engage life’s decisive questions – what are your values? What is your place in the universe? What is yearning to come into the world through you? And, to what is your life in service?

At the cusp of adulthood, young people must confront these questions for themselves. You must find your own answers. The quest to do so will be uniquely yours – surely different from my generation, as you must navigate these “matters of ultimate concern” in a rapidly changing and uncertain world. And yet, for millennia, those that came before you wrestled with these questions and somehow, most of us found answers.

In 1902, a 19-year-old student wrote to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, seeking guidance in the midst of a serious personal crisis. Rilke generously wrote back, and the correspondence was eventually published as Letters to a Young Poet. Rilke’s advice seems the perfect offering as you set off on the next leg of your journey.

“Have patience about everything that is still unresolved in your heart; try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a truly foreign language. Don’t look for the answers now: they cannot be given to you yet because you cannot yet live them, and what matters is to live everything. For now, live the questions. If you do, then maybe, gradually, without your realizing it, some far-off day you will live your way into the answer.”2

1. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage, (April 1, 2004) p. 101

2. Rainer Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, (November 10, 2020) p. 21-22

A version of this essay appeared last month at Psychology Today.

News from Lisa

What I’m reading:

The UK analyst Alessandra Lemma has a new book out titled Psychotechnical Becomings: Psychoanalysis, Identity, Desire, and Mourning in the Age of AI and Digital Mediation. Lemma’s insights are always original, and her prose is clear and exciting to read. She is one of the clearest thinkers about this particular cultural moment and what it means for psychoanalysis.

Join me in person!

I’ll be a featured speaker at the Kosmos Institute First Annual Colloquium in Ascona, Switzerland, this December 17-21. Learn more here.

You’ll also find me at the The Unspeakeasy Second Annual Small Gathering for Big Ideas, this October 19-21. Details here.

Podcast interview

I spoke with Jungian analyst Polly Young-Eisendrath on Stereotypes and Archetypes: Mothering and Motherhood. The interview is available on YouTube here.

New website

I have a really beautiful new website - I’d love you to take a look! There are lots of resources there, with more to come. You’ll find a free Guide to Anger on the homepage, and an email course and a video on the Inner Life of Mothers on the book page for Motherhood.