The Nature and Paradoxes of Story: An Exploratory Essay

Hugh Crago

doi:10.32798/dlk.1949

Published: 2025-12-31

Vol. 7 No. 2 (2025)

The Nature and Paradoxes of Story: An Exploratory Essay

Hugh Crago

Dzieciństwo. Literatura i Kultura

Section: Essays

https://doi.org/10.32798/dlk.1949

Abstract

What ‘stories’ are is ultimately determined by how those stories are experienced by individual readers. This essay considers key aspects of ‘story’ as experienced by those who ‘consume’ them, as well as by those who create them. The author underscores that story is predominantly a solitary experience; that good stories create a sense of flow which readers enjoy and do not want to end; that stories are experienced as ‘real’ as long as we are ‘under their spell’; that stories typically reflect the temporary dominance of the right cerebral hemisphere over the left, creating an ‘altered state of consciousness’ in the reader, listener, or viewer; that stories communicate metaphorically, through unconscious projection of the reader’s self into the story’s characters, and hence do not lend themselves to analysis and abstraction – the tools of the left cerebral hemisphere. Stories cannot be ‘taught,’ only ‘experienced.’

Keywords:

flow, projection and identification, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, reader-response criticism, story

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Crago, H. (2025). The Nature and Paradoxes of Story: An Exploratory Essay. Dzieciństwo. Literatura I Kultura, 7(2), 171–197. https://doi.org/10.32798/dlk.1949

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Hugh Crago

wiseoldgoat7@gmail.com
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5018-7529

Affiliation:

Badacz niezależny Australia

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

Hugh Crago was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1946. He was educated at the University of New England (Australia) and Merton College, Oxford (UK). In 1983, Maureen and Hugh Crago published a landmark study of a preschool child’s developing response to picture and story books over five years – the first to be based on the child’s tape-recorded comments and questions during reading sessions. 40 years later, Self and Story in Early Childhood: Children’s Developing Minds Revealed by Parent-led Research (2023) placed this earlier work in the context of comparable empirical studies published between 1954 and 2005. Throughout this lifelong scholarly enquiry, Hugh has drawn on his further studies in lifespan human development and counselling psychology, both of which he taught at universities in Australia from 1991. Hugh retired in 2012 as Senior Lecturer in Counselling at Western Sydney University and has continued to publish on literary response in children and adults, as well as on children’s literature, family therapy, and the training of psychotherapists.