Co-author of The Hero's Journey
Reg Harris, M.A.
Reg Harris, co-author of The Hero's Journey: A Guide to Literature and Life, began his teaching career in 1969 and has taught at most educational levels, ranging from junior high through college graduate. Harris just retired from teaching language arts at Vintage High School in Napa, California, where he had been teaching since 1986.
Education
Harris graduated magna cum laude from Fresno State College in 1969 with a BA in English. As an honors graduate at FSU, he earned his secondary teaching credential at FSU. In 1985, Harris began his research into the hero's journey 1985. He worked independently until 2001, when he was accepted into the MA program in psychology at Sonoma State University. He earned an MA in humanistic, existential and transpersonal psychology in 2004.
His post-graduate work focused on the psychological, developmental, and transformational processes represented in the hero's journey pattern, and his 153-page thesis, The eternal circle: A hermeneutic model of the heroic journey archetype, presented an original, psychological model of the journey process. The model is meaning-centered and incorporates elements from several approaches to psychology, including Jungian, gestalt, existential, humanistic and narrative.
Research
More than two decades of using and studying the journey pattern have taken Harris into a number of related areas of interest: existentialism, post-modernism, phenomenology, Eastern philosophy, archetypal interpretation, and mythology. He developed a deep interest in hermeneutics, the process of interpretation and building meaning. During his graduate work, he studied existential, humanistic, and Jungian psychologies, with a special interest in gestalt and narrative therapies. He has a special passion for the power myth and story to shape and determine our self perception, to guide our interactions with the world and to help us heal and grow.
A student of Eastern philosophy since 1970, Harris has deep interest in philosophical Taoism and Zen Buddhism. He is especially interested in the impact of these two philosophies on existentialism, gestalt learning theory, and Jungian psychology. He has also done extensive research on polarity and taught a class called "Transformational Polarities in Mythology" in the master's program at Pacifica Graduate Institute.
Workshops and seminars
Harris has presented dozens of workshops and seminars, ranging from in-service workshops for individual schools to presentations at state conventions for the California Association of Teachers of English and the Oregon Council of Teachers of English. His topics have included:
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Awakening the Hero in Your Students: an introduction to the heroic journey pattern,
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The Hero's Journey in Mythology,
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The Tragic Hero and the Call Refused,
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The Mandala: A map to the personal journey.
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The Journey in Modern Film: Heroes and antiheroes,
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The Adolescent Journey: using developmental and cognitive psychology to understand the adolescent experience,
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Existentialism and the journey,
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Hermeneutics, meaning and the journey process,
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The Personal Journey in a Postmodern World (using The Matrix and Harold and Maude),
On June 11, 2007, Harris was a keynote speaker at the 30th Anniversary Tribute to Star Wars at Modesto Junior College. His presentation, "Use the Force, George," explored the influence of Joseph Campbell on George Lucas and the expression of the heroic journey pattern in Star Wars: A New Hope, the original 1977 film.
Harris is available for workshops, in-service presentations and seminars. You may contact him at [email protected].