Concept of the Hero's Journey

The concept of the hero's journey and how it reflects certain archetypal ideas derives from Jungian psychology and from sociological and cultural analysis by researchers like Joseph Campbell. Jung speaks of archetypes in terms of dreams, but drama is a way for the community to work out these archetypes in public ritual. For that matter, film in particular has much in common with dreaming, and the science fiction film Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) presents a hero in the form of Deckard who takes a spiritual and psychological journey and who changes in the course of that journey, thus living out the ritual for the audience.

Joseph Campbell sees the tales we tell as being shaped around certain central motifs, repeated patterns indicating deeper psychological needs and beliefs. He states that in our mythology, the hero succeeds by being reborn, which can be taken either literally in some myths or as a metaphor for necessary change, for the reconciliation of opposing forces within the hero. The opposing forces of death and life are what are normally reconciled in the hero:

Everywhere, no matter what the sphere of interest (whether religious, political, or personal), the really creative acts are represented as those deriving from some sort of dying to the world; and what happens in the interval of the hero's nonentity, so that he comes back as one reborn, made great and filled with creative power, mankind is also unanimous in declaring (Campbell 35-36).

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primordial images of the collective unconscious and as symbols pointing to the meaning within this collective unconscious. Jung referred to these primordial images as archetypes. Dreams are seen as a way of communicating through these images, with the intent of the unconscious being to convey the meaning behind certain inner states and to show their relationship to the collective unconscious. For Jung, the archetypal symbol serves as a mediator between conscious and unconscious. It enables a dialectical interaction between the two opposing and compensatory systems of the conscious and the unconscious: The powerful factor, the factor which changes our whole life, which changes the surface of our known world, which makes history, is collective psychology, and collective psychology moves according to laws entirely different from those of our consciousness. The archetypes are the great decisive force, they bring about real events, and not our personal reason and practical intellect (Jung 183). The persona archetype serves the purpose of allowing the individual to portray a character not necessarily his or her own, and the persona is thus a mask exhibited publicly that presents a favorable impression so society will accept th

Category: Psychology - C