ABSTRACT
In an early essay, Bruner explored the pedagogical power of myth and its situation in contemporary society. The form of myth, he argued, is principally that of drama, a fact which lies at the heart of its significance as a source of instruction. Myth has a dramatic shape because that, too, is the shape of the personality. To explain this he refers to Freud, who likened the personality to a cast of characters, which a playwright has the ability to decompose and project into the dramatis personae of the stage. The genius of the Greek dramatists lay precisely in their power to do this, to enter vividly into the feelings of the opposing parties in a conflict and to present them on stage in a fashion that was at once both mythic and realistic; that is, through the representation of preternatural forces and characters, they could describe a society which the audience could recognize as its own. But at the heart of the instructive power of myth Bruner locates the dramatic nature of the multiple self, within which our discordant impulses are bound and structured in a set of identities.
