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In an episode of Northern Exposure, an American television series of the early 1990 s, Leonard, a native healer, visits the small fictional town of Cicely, Alaska, to interview the town residents as part of a research project. Since some of his patients are white, Leonard seeks to find stories of white culture that have a healing value and give expression to the white man's collective unconscious. He becomes exasperated however as he interviews the townspeople for the stories they tell have no therapeutic value or psychological interest, as do those of the native people. He gets mostly the gibberish of high school misadventures. In a conversation with his young apprentice, Ed, who is also a budding filmmaker, Leonard is introduced to the subtleties of film story telling. He then realizes that in films may lie the stories that have the most relevance to the modern white man's psyche; these are the stories he was looking for.
John Izod has written a book which substantiates Leonard's discovery as to where one might find the white ‘healing stories’ reflecting the white collective unconscious. He demonstrates the relationship of certain stories found in films and some of the icons of modern culture to the levels of the psyche as they are found in other more traditional