Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF)/Too Long: Didn’t Read (TL:DR)
Storytelling is a one of humanity’s oldest tools, invented to entertain, inform, and transform others. Through the stories we tell, we transmit tangible and intangible aspects of the struggle to come into correspondence with ourselves, others, and reality itself, along the path to transcendence. Psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman and Editor Shawn Coyne provide a roadmap to such a path.
Warning: This post is for those interested in psychology and story nerds, so it may not be your jam. If it is, read on, gentle reader.
I. Maslow and Kaufman:
Most everyone is familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It percolates into public consciousness here and there, at various levels over the decades. One of the lesser-known details is that he never intended it to be a pyramid, in the vein of the food pyramids most of us grew up with in America, detailing the proper consumption of food groups. At the end of his life, he was on the hunt for the next ridgeline—something he called self-transcendence.
Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, a humanistic psychologist, has picked up the torch that Dr. Maslow tragically dropped when he passed away at the age of 62. Kaufman has synthesized Maslow’s work, including the unpublished journals from his later thinking, with the best modern research into how to live a good life.
Kaufman, in reconfiguring Maslow, uses the metaphor of a sailboat to describe the elements a human requires to create a transcendent life. Below the waterline, humans need Safety, Connection, and Self-Esteem. These are predominantly defensive and security oriented, meaning that when a human is running a deficit in these elements, it is like water coming into the hull. The hull must be sound—you can’t be taking on water, in order to really travel somewhere interesting with your life.
But once that hull is watertight, you can focus on the sail—the part of your life that can take you to interesting places, to meet new people, and open your eyes to fresh possibilities. For Kaufman, the sail is comprised of three parts: Exploration, Love, and Purpose. These are the elements that propel us to our higher selves— our “Better Angels” as Lincoln said.
Together, these six elements nonlinearly interact to create the emergence of what Kaufman calls Transcendence, a sublime seventh element I would equate to the Greek concept of Eudamonia, or Human Flourishing. To quickly define these terms:
Safety: The base need, related to stability, certainty, predictability, coherence, and continuity.
Connection: The need to belong, mutuality, intimacy, relatedness.
Self-Esteem: Sense of self-worth, connected to mastery of a domain, confidence in oneself.
Exploration: Encountering adversity, discovering new information, extracting meaning and growth from experiences.
Love: Feeling for the being of another person, admiring another- a combination of agency (self-assertion) and communion (unity with another).
Purpose: Overarching aspiration that energizes one’s efforts and provides a central sense of meaning and significance in one’s life.
Transcendence: Emergent phenomenon resulting from the harmonious integration of one’s whole self in the service of cultivating the good society.
II. Coyne and the Genre Blueprint:
For the last several decades, editor, publisher, and author Shawn Coyne has been at work searching for the eternal form of story. Why do some stories stand the test of time over others? What is it about them that keeps readers buying copies, centuries after publication? Rather than saying “this doesn’t work” to a writer with some esoteric hand-waving, Coyne wants to provide granular, specific feedback on how they can improve their stories. In that vein, he recently developed a framework for understanding ‘masterworks’—those timeless, eternal classics that speak to humans over long time spans.
Incorporating psychology, cognitive science, systems thinking, information theory, complexity science, biology, and other disciplines, his work seeks to abstract story to learn how it can be crafted to disseminate timeless wisdom, advantageous ways of being, and be enjoyable to read at the same time. In Coyne’s framing, stories can either have a prescriptive (“do this”) or a cautionary (“don’t do this”) theme (which Coyne refers to as a controlling idea),
Much in the way the brilliant Alicia Juarerro talks about constraints, he employs governing functions (constraining story options) and generating functions (enabling story possibilities) to describe how narrative creates a full-bodied, holistic story. The framework Coyne created, Story Grid, actually has twelve content genres for story, but his “Genre Blueprint” collapses them to six that can effectively create a work of art that will endure. The other thing I want to note here is that Coyne divides the elements of story into three parts:
The three ‘governing genres’ (constraining) are Status, Morality/Heroic Journey 2.0, and Worldview. These provide limits to the contours of the narrative and thus, spur innovation (the idea that in scarcity, there is creativity). The three ‘generating genres’ (enabling) are Action, Love, and Horror. These expand the contours of the story through imagination. These six genres are joined by a seventh, Invariant pattern. Here’s a quick snapshot:
Status: Features a protagonist striving to maintain or improve their social standing and focuses on the price they must pay to do so.
Morality/HJ 2.0: The sophisticated protagonist’s inner moral compass actively changes or is tested to the extreme. They shift from corruption and selfishness to altruism and self-sacrifice for others.
Worldview: The protagonist must change by overcoming something within themselves, giving up a want to get what they need.
Action: Life and death stuff, primal survival.
Love: These tales break into stories of courtship, marriage, and obsession, they may or may not end with the lovers living happily ever after.
Horror: Dealing with a chaotic break from reality, trying to problem solve, and attempting to find understanding within. Goes to limits of human experience.
Invariant: Together, these six genres aggregate nonlinearly into an invariant, or unchanging strand, which describes story structure at its most abstract, elemental, and universal form.
3. Aligning the models
Cards on the table: I’ve taken some liberties here. I have moved several of the needs around from where Kaufman placed them — you can check the changes with the image at the beginning of this essay. My reasoning is that while I did move the order around, I maintained the security related needs “below the waterline” and did the same with the growth-related needs “on the sail.” I did this to align his model with Coyne’s—to show the alternating push/pull power of a governing and generating genre at each level of story— On the Surface (Status/Self-Esteem and Action/Safety), Above the Surface (Morality HJ 2.0/ Connection and Love/Love), and Beyond the Surface (Worldview/Purpose and Horror/Exploration).
The Status component of a story is all about your place in the world, which maps to Kaufman’s Self-Esteem. This is not a perfect mapping. You can have a high self-esteem while having a low status in your group. However, as Maslow defines this, “All people in our society (with a few pathological exceptions) have a need or desire for a stable, firmly based, (usually high) evaluation of themselves, for self-respect, or self-esteem, and for the esteem of others.” (A Theory of Human Motivation, 1943).
The Action component according to Coyne, concerns life or death stakes, something embodied by the need for Safety. This relates to physical danger, something all humans must contend with, whether they’d like to admit it or not.
Connection “connects” to Morality/HJ 2.0 as a story genre. According to Coyne, the Morality/Heroic Journey 2.0 (Itself an update to Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’) is about “the discovery of value, of valuing one thing over another, and the desires of the heroes are three: 1. A close connection with reality— they want attunement. 2. An integrated psyche, such that they are not at war with themselves. 3. To be a part of something bigger than themselves (Translation: connected to something beyond themselves).
Coyne’s Love genre tracks with Kaufman’s Love need. As Anne Hathaway’s character in the movie Interstellar notes here, “love is the one thing that we (humans) are capable of perceiving that transcends time and space.” Enough said.
Worldview and Purpose are not a perfect match; however, Worldview—the Vervaekian relevance realization of what the world is to you, what is important to you, and how you relate to it, will naturally segue into what you decide to do with your life, your Purpose in this world. These two are intimately connected—Worldview drives Purpose.
Horror, as Coyne defines it, is all about problem-solving, about humanity touching the unknown in a manner which could create insanity in those who are ill-prepared, but resilience and success in those who are. Likewise, Exploration is a journey into the unknown, fraught with all the dangers such a novel experience can bring.
Story is an ancient tool, optimized through the long centuries to focus on those things that will truly help humankind succeed. It is an antifragile (grows stronger when stressed) medium through which humans convey the proper conduct of a human life in a prescriptive stories. Cautionary stories (Mad Men, Breaking Bad) reveal the Via Negativa, the negative path—how not to live your life, which is sometimes even more valuable.
For Kaufman, the human need for Self-Esteem, Safety, Connection, Love, Purpose, and Exploration, ultimately aggregate into Transcendence, and a life well lived.
In Coyne’s framing, this is understanding how to Survive, Thrive, and Derive (Meaning) through six genres of storytelling —Status, Action, Morality, Love, Worldview, Horror, and one Invariant pattern.
No matter the manner and medium of expression, “the song remains the same.”
