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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).

The action of the hero has as its effect the revivification of the world through the nurturing act of that hero in reconciling the opposing forces:

The effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release again of the flow of life into the body of the world. The miracle of this flow may be represented in physical terms as a circulation of food substance, dynamically as a streaming of energy, or spiritually as a manifestation of grace (Campbell...

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Concept of the Hero's Journey. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 03:52, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1702229.html