john bridger: mind's mental shorthand for integrating new information or concepts using the familiar. The closer you can get to empathy

john bridger: with your framing, the better. As such, Cindy and Casey are much more effective than Mother Sheehan and her son, because people can empathize much better with Cindy than they can with an abstract archetypal mother. Archetypes have the most power when they are expressed as the stories about real people with whom others can empathize. As an example, the Joad familiy in Grapes of Wrath are archetypal characters, but the book would have been boring and lame if it had actively painted them as archetypes rather than letting the archetypes emerge out of the empathetic human characters it portrayed.