1461279
1461279
2009
ABSTRACT
An abstract of the final document of Thomas Haitsma for the Master of Arts degree,
Union Institute & University, March 2008.
Title: Epic Fantasy and Archetypal Therapy for Young Adult Males: The Many
Meanings of ‘The Hero’
The epic fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert Jordan, and Matthew Hughes are analyzed
through the lens of Jungian and Archetypal Therapies with a focus on heroism and the
value of myth for young adult males. The internal struggles of the Hero are explored
using the insights of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and James Hillman as filtered through
the work of Edward Edinger. Literary examples including Tolkien’s Turin Turambar
from The Children of Hurin, and Jordan’s Rand al’Thor from The Wheel of Time, are
discussed as emblematic of the Hero’s struggle with both internal and external darkness.
Hughes’s The Commons serves as a capstone for reflections on the life lessons imparted
by the Hero’s symbolic journey toward self-awareness, with special reference to the ego
and the development of the psyche.
Table of Contents
Introduction / Chapter 1 1
Chapter 2 21
Chapter 3 52
Works Cited 73
iii
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Chapter 1
Introduction
Archetypal Therapy, with its focus on reconnecting with spirit, and integrating the
self, is ideally suited to the problem of teen alienation because it speaks to young adults
in the language they understand, image and symbol, the very language of the Internet and
Videogame world. The Jungian concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious
must be updated in order to be comprehensible to this generation. James Hillman’s work
laid the foundation for Archetypal Therapy in books like Healing Fiction, Soul’s Code
and The Force of Character and is a vital first step in this process. Young adult males are
especially drawn to fantasy and science fiction, because although they might not be
consciously aware of it, they are desperately seeking guidance on how to be in the world
and what it means to be an adult, how to become the heroes of their own lives. The
escapist impulse of taking refuge in simpler, more black and white worlds can be turned
into a positive instructive tool. The archetypal figure of The Hero and his struggle with
The Dragon, and its shadow energy, can become an image and message of empowerment.
In the first section, we will briefly analyze the theoretical foundation Jung has
laid, in the theories of the collective unconscious and archetypes, and how Hillman built
upon this groundwork to create Archetypal Therapy, which includes a redefinition of
‘daimons’ into a more constructive context. Joseph Campbell’s reflections on the
universal characteristics of the hero archetype will lead us into our analysis of specific
fantasy texts. In the second section of this paper, we will be examining heroes and the
spiritual quest in the work of epic fantasy authors including J.R.R. Tolkien, in The
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Children of Hurin, and Robert Jordan, in The Wheel of Time. The third and concluding
section will feature the work of Matthew Hughes in The Commons, a fictional world in
which archetypal forces become conscious and alive, as well as analysis of Tolkien’s
version of the classic morality tale Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This section will
include general reflections on the meaning of heroism in our contemporary world and
some resonances with heroic tales from the great religious myths.
Archetypal Therapy is a therapy of the imagination, of a creative interaction with
the world and the energies within us. The founder of contemporary Archetypal Therapy,
James Hillman, expands upon Jung by adding an interactive element and giving the client
a greater role and voice in their own healing process. In Healing Fiction, Hillman
describes how to work with your ‘daimons’, personified archetypal energies that you
come into contact with in your day-to-day life. Rather than rejecting these forces as
‘demonic’ as Christianity has often done because they stand outside of a traditional
monotheistic context, Hillman urges us to embrace them and thus enrich our lives by
tapping into the deepest potential of ourselves.
We lose little pieces of ourselves throughout the course of our lives and each
individual loss, each individual compromise the world demands, may not be significant in
and of itself. However, if you add up these little moments of soul loss, exacerbated by
the demanding and hectic nature of Twenty-First Century technological life, many people
end up feeling listless, as if their life lacks direction, meaning or purpose. Rather than
choosing the instant fix of a pill, or looking for meaning in runaway consumer culture,
archetypal therapy provides a way of reconnecting not only with ourselves, but with the
rich tapestry of human history and experience.
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Encapsulated within archetypes is the traditional way of relating to spirit and
spirit energies that shamanic practitioners have utilized since the early history of human
society. Carl Jung rediscovered this ancient form of symbolism, this vocabulary for
understanding and contextualizing experience in the early Twentieth Century, and it was
his groundbreaking insight into the world of the collective unconscious that has made all
the depth and archetypal therapies that have followed possible.
Before a more in-depth exploration of Carl Jung, and James Hillman’s re-
interpretation of Jung, it is important to understand the malaise that affects our culture
today, and especially our young people. People in modern societies feel lost, they feel
groundless and without foundation in a world that is rapidly changing. Old methods of
creating meaning, including much mythology and religion, have been outpaced by rapid
technological and cultural change. Never in our history have human societies and the
human psyche needed myths, archetypes and legends more because they create meaning
from chaos, and place the things of the world in a sacred context. Myths are narratives
that help us to understand the world, cognitively and emotionally. The old myths and
legends cannot keep pace with the rapid pace of global change, and new myths have not
yet been created adequate to the task of creating meaning.
For evidence of this craving we need look no further than the rabid appetite of
fans for writing, music, and movies that have mythic and archetypal elements. From the
long lines of die-hard fans waiting in line outside ‘Star Wars’, ‘Star Trek’, and ‘Matrix’
premieres to see those movies, to the recent spectacle that the release of the final ‘Harry
Potter’ book created, to those addicted to online role-playing games like ‘World of
Warcraft’, people in modern societies are starving for anything with genuine mythic
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content. This is the case because mythic content feeds us, it sustains us; it nourishes us
with real meaning and rich symbolism, where so much of popular culture is empty, vapid
and transient.
The purest present day sources of the kind of shamanic storytelling that once
sustained the psyche are epic fantasy and science fiction, they are the myths and legends
of our time and in them archetypes and the experience of the collective unconscious are
validated and affirmed. This affirmation provides a context for our modern experience, a
way of understanding not only the world, but ourselves. Epic fantasy provides a refuge
from the modern world, a place to which millions of young minds can escape. But
hidden within this escape is the potential for personal redemption, if individuals can be
taught how to unlock and decode the symbols of heroism.
The Hero’s Journey is ultimately one of integration, and one that bears directly on
the therapeutic process of coming to terms with the true nature of reality and the true
nature of the self. Real self-acceptance is never an easy process, but it is the very
essence of the hero’s path; since ultimately the enemy being struggled against is not the
dragon, but the self. Some heroes, like Tolkien’s Turin Turambar, are not able to accept
this, while others like Jordan’s Rand al’Thor are better able to compromise the nature of
their quests with the demands of reality. On a more cosmic scale, when archetypal
energies are denied and pushed aside, there can powerful consequences, as in Hughes’s
The Commons, in which the disaffected daimons of the collective unconscious stage a
revolt.
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Carl Jung: Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Carl Jung diverged from the dominant Freudianism of his day because he looked
at the unconscious/subconscious in a new way. In sharp contrast to Freud, Jung saw the
unconscious as a natural part of the psyche, not something to be repressed or analyzed.
In essence, Jung did not pathologize the unconscious as sexual energy or dark
potentiality; rather he saw it as a fully formed world, complimentary to consciousness, in
fact the very basis and wellspring of it. Taking a step beyond even this appreciation,
Jung saw that there were striking parallels between the unconscious worlds of many of
his patients, leading him to hypothesize that these commonalities might spring from a
universal source.
This world of the ‘collective unconscious’, is one from which we each partake,
like a vast reservoir of water that feeds each person as he or she wanders the desert of
their individual, separated lives. The collective unconscious is peopled by ‘archetypes’,
energies that represent common strands and threads of human experience. Hence ‘The
Fool’, ‘The Wise Man’, ‘The Trickster’ and so on, become symbols of the experience
from which they are distilled, coming to represent the essence of a particular facet of the
psyche. In this paper, we will be most interested in ‘The Hero’ and ‘The Dragon’, the
first a champion of light and order, and the later a symbol of darkness and shadow
potentiality.
Before exploring specific archetypes, or the ways they can manifest themselves as
daimonic energy, it is important to be grounded in Jung’s basic, fundamental insight. By
seeing the human psyche as part of something larger, something greater, something in a
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way timeless, Carl Jung gave humanity back its sense of history and context. In the
Freudian worldview, an individual was just an individual, fighting their weary way alone.
But Jung looked deeper, to the greater scope of human and evolutionary history.
It struck me what it means to live with a myth, and what it
means to be without one. Myth, says a Church Father, is ‘what is
believed always, everywhere, by everybody’; hence the man who
thinks he can live without myth, or outside it, is an exception.
He is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past,
or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet
with contemporary human society (Campbell, Portable Jung xxi).
In this particular case, Jung is in part generalizing from the case of “an American
woman on the brink of a schizophrenic breakdown” (xxi), in which he saw that she was
so lost, so in despair, because she lacked grounding, she lacked context and without
context or purpose life can feel meaningless. One of the current, commonly accepted
definitions of depression is hopelessness. But it is natural to feel hopeless if you are
simply an individual facing a bewildering world alone, without the context of a deeper
understanding of what is going on, not only in your life, but in your world.
Myth, and here I mean ‘myth’ in a meta-sense, including those personal beliefs
we live by, though they are sometimes narcissistic or even destructive, like the myth that
money will make us happy, or that dying in battle will grant one eternity in paradise;
myth as functioning paradigm, myth as the guiding principle in our lives. Without these
myths we feel alone, we feel lost. This is precisely what so many young people feel
today; they feel they live in a world without greater context or meaning than meeting the
needs of the self, or being mindless consumers. So they replace true, nourishing Myths
with whatever ‘myths’ are available, from drugs to alcohol to a range of addictions and
maladaptive behavior. This may seem preferable to a young person because the
alternative, living without any level of myth is a profound malaise and hopelessness.
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Without a mythic sense of time and place and scale, without some deeper
understanding of reality, life can feel like an exercise in futility, as if one is simply going
through the motions. This is aimless life, as an ‘uprooted’ tree is a tragic way to be in the
world, especially when Jungian psychology and Archetypal therapy can give us the tools
to reconnect with meaning and purpose.
Instead, if individuals can see themselves as part of a totality, part of a whole, a
continuity that stretches back through our history as conscious beings, they can
reconnect. “The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years.
Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of a season, sprung from…
beneath the earth… for the root matter is the mother of all things” (xxi). This
understanding of life as organic, as coming from a source and part of a greater entity is
particularly nourishing to the spirit because the tendency in much Western philosophy is
to think of men as completely adrift and rudderless, to think of life in Nietzschean terms
of ‘man alone against the world’. Rather than seeing the relationship of human beings to
the world as antagonistic, as a struggle that must be won, as an intractable conflict, Jung
is enabling us to see humanity is a much deeper, more nuanced context. Man is part of
the world, not the world, and consciousness is part of Man, not the entirety.
In order to understand archetypes, personalized psychic forces at work within the
collective unconscious, it is important to first understand what defines the collective
unconscious. As we will see, these terms are so intertwined it is difficult to distill them
out into separate definitions. One could think of the collective unconscious as a world
and archetypes as the beings which people that world, or of the collective unconscious as
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a zoo, and archetypes a collection