The Hero's Journey: A resource for educators, teachers, and students

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Thought of the Week
March 2001

March 5

The original satisfaction of primary narcissism, said Freud, is established in the psyche as a memory, which then becomes a model or schema, preserved as an "idea," for what is sought in later life. As Freud described it, the memory of this satisfaction becomes established in the mind as a concrete "thing," which the person either identifies with or tries to re-create. This concretization of experience, which the thinking mind is so expert at carrying out, is what the Buddhists call ignorance. ...

The the self, according to the Buddha's langauge of the ancient Sutras, is a fiction -- a mirage, a shadow, or a dream. ..."The mind," echoed the sixth Zen patriarch, Hui-neng, in the seventh century A.D., "is at bottom an imagination." And, "since imagination is the same as illusion," he concluded, "there is nothing to be attached to."

Mark Epstein, M.D.

March 12, 2001

Man is all the time outside of himself: it is in the projecting and losing himself beyond himself that he makes man to exist; and, on the other hand, it is by pursuing transcendent aims that he himself is able to exist. Since man is thus self-surpassing, he is himself the heart and center of his transcendence. There is no other universe except the human universe, the universe of human subjectivity.

This is humanism, because we remind man that there is no legislator but himself; that he himself, thus abandoned, must decide for himself; also because we show that it is not by turning back upon himself, but always by seeking, beyond himself, an aim, which is one of liberation or of some particular realization, that man can realize himself as truly human.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Comment:

Existentially, there is no universe but the subjective universe, the universe as we experience it in our minds through the vehicle of our senses. To exist as "I", a being separate from other beings, we must exist actively as an object against a ground of everything that is "not I." To lock ourselves in ourselves, in our own subjectivity, is to remove our relationship with the ground of our existence (not-I).

So to exist, we must transcend, go beyond, the sense of "I" as object and throw ourselves into the ground of "not-I", to experience our own being, our own separateness. But the separateness that is "I" is not independent of the ground "not-I." They coexist, are really polar perceptions of being-non-being. So to exist, we must transcend the monopolar nature of self and exist in the unified bi-polar self/not-self.

To realize something is to make it real, which is to place it in the field of all that is "not real." To realize the self, we must know the "not self." As Sartre says leter, "it is not by turning back upon himself, but by seeking beyond, that man can realize himself as truly human."

This, I think is the essence of the Heroic Journey process. It is the pattern of our constant equilibrium with "not-self." As we change, our relationship changes, and so requires adjustment. That adjustment takes the form of the Journey. As Sartre says, "it is only by seeking beyond ourselves" that we experience ourselves as individuals. This is why accepting the calls to our journeys is critical to mental health. Otherwise we lose the experience of our own existence.

I will write more later on this idea and its possible relationship to literature.

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March 19

Fantasy images that are the stuff and values of soul are structured by archetypes. They "direct all fantasy activity into its appointed paths," says Jung. These paths are mythological; or rather, we see that fantasy flows into particular motifs (mythologems) and constellations of persons in action (mythemes). These patternings appear in myths the world over, and in literature, art, scientific theories, and theological doctrines; also in dreams, even the dreams of children, and in the delusional systems of the insane -- wherever imagination manifests itself in the products of the mind. Within these fantasy-miages are the archetypal persons of myths. Their interrelations are the structural principles of psychic life.

James Hillman

March 26

In terms of education, how do we work with this model? How does this personality function in the classroom? The main lines of this process have been implied, but let us go over them now more explicitly.

First of all, if we reconceive education in terms of what we have said here, it becomes a "leading out" of an individual's capacities, talents, uniqueness, person, into his whole possibilities, and its aim becomes the balanced development of the personality toward intellectual, emotional, social, and moral maturity. As such, education clearly becomes person-centered, rather than oriented to the teaching of subject matter, skills or disciplines, per se -- which is not to say we are abandoning these disciplines, but only that we are putting them in a secondary position to the learner himself.

The student's experience is primary, the foundation on which he builds his education. Questions such as "Who am I?" "What do I want?" "What has meaning?" become vitally important and central to the process of education and must be dealt with fully and directly. ...to do this a student needs to find and experience his center, become aware of his personality aspects and subpersonalities and how they operate, assess his blocks, conflicts, and polarities, and then begin the work of growing, using the processes of awareness, energy, assimilation, and confluence.

...the primary thrust here is toward self-awareness and understanding, for this is the foundation on which his education will be built.