Hero

Definition

The hero, in Jung’s usage, is not a kind of person but a pattern the psyche produces whenever consciousness has to be won against resistance. In the myths the pattern is a figure of unusual birth who leaves home, meets a monster, is swallowed or dies, and returns changed with something the community lacked. Jung read all of this as an image of the ego separating itself from the unconscious. The hero personifies the libido, his dragon is the pull back towards childhood and the mother, and his victory is a rebirth of consciousness out of the dark. Because the pattern belongs to the psyche and not to any individual, Jung insisted that the archetype of the hero no more proves the existence of a hero than the God-image proves God.

Three bodies of work are regularly run together under this name. Otto Rank’s pattern of the hero’s birth (1909) predates Jung’s and was read through Freud. Jung’s hero as the ego’s struggle (1912, rewritten 1952) is this entry’s subject. Joseph Campbell’s monomyth (1949) is a comparative mythologist’s pattern of the adventure, built with help from both; “Hero’s Journey” is a registered United States trade mark of the Joseph Campbell Foundation (reg. 4,246,622) and is used here only to name it.

History

Rank, then in Freud’s circle, published Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden in 1909 (English 1914) and extracted from Sargon, Moses, Oedipus, Perseus, Gilgamesh, Romulus, Jesus, Siegfried and others a standard saga:

The hero is the child of most distinguished parents; usually the son of a king. His origin is preceded by difficulties … During the pregnancy there is a prophecy, in form of a dream or oracle, cautioning against his birth … As a rule, he is surrendered to the water, in a box. He is then saved by animals, or by lowly people (shepherds) and is suckled by a female animal, or by a humble woman. — Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909; Robbins and Jelliffe, Trans., 1914), Gutenberg #66192

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Rank read the saga as the child’s fantasy about its parents projected onto national figures; the 1914 translation already records Jung’s divergent reading of the hero’s fate as the libido and its vicissitudes.

That reading is Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1911–12), published in English in 1916 as Psychology of the Unconscious. Taking the published fantasies of Miss Frank Miller, an American he never met, Jung followed their symbolism through comparative mythology. Part II, chapter IV, “The Unconscious Origin of the Hero”, introduces the hero as the libido in human form; chapter VI is “The Battle for Deliverance from the Mother”; chapter VII, drawing on Rank for the two mothers, gives the definition:

The hero is a hero because he sees in every difficulty of life resistance to the forbidden treasure, and fights that resistance with the complete yearning which strives towards the treasure, attainable with difficulty, or unattainable, the yearning which paralyzes and kills the ordinary man. — C. G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious (1916), Part II, chapter VII, Gutenberg #65903

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The same chapter adds that no man is or ever was a hero, since the hero is a god and therefore impersonal. He rewrote the book in 1952 as Symbole der Wandlung (CW 5), keeping the thesis and the chapter titles; but the CW 5 paragraph numbers belong to the 1952 text and cannot be dated to 1912 without checking the Hinkle translation. The 1952 chapter “The Dual Mother” makes the hero myth an unconscious drama seen only in projection, like Plato’s cave (CW 5 ¶612, as given by Sharp, 1991), and the obstacles on his path the Terrible Mother (¶611). The hero’s descent and return, Jung writes there,

… signifies a renewal of the light and hence a rebirth of consciousness from the darkness. — C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation (1952), CW 5 ¶558, as quoted in Samuels (1985)

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The later Jung kept the hero but subordinated it. In the Tavistock Lectures (1935) a patient’s crab-lizard is the dragon the hero motif always brings with it, and the dragon is the mother (CW 18, Lecture 3). In The Integration of the Personality (1939) the hero and the puer aeternus are themes that may run through the whole process of individuation without being its goal. The 1940 essay on the child archetype makes the hero’s chief feat the overcoming of the monster of darkness, consciousness triumphing over the unconscious (CW 9i ¶284, as given by Sharp, 1991). Psychology and Alchemy (1944) opens with the warning that the archetype of the hero does not posit a hero (CW 12 ¶15), and its section “The Myth of the Hero” reads the alchemists’ death of the king’s son as consciousness descending into the unconscious, in the position of the primitive hero devoured by the dragon (CW 12 ¶437).

Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) is a different book. Campbell took the word “monomyth” from Finnegans Wake (his note 35) and the formula from the rites of passage: separation, initiation, return (Prologue, section 3, “The Hero and the God”), elaborated in Part I as Departure, Initiation and Return with seventeen sub-stages. Campbell credits Freud, Jung, Rank and Róheim together and borrows Jung’s phrase “archetypal images”, but the pattern is his own, and it is usually his that later readers mean by the hero archetype. Joseph Henderson’s chapter in Man and His Symbols (1964), his own work and often misattributed to Jung, restated Jung’s line for general readers through Radin’s Winnebago hero cycles.

The debate

The classical reading is stable. For Samuels (1985) the hero is the symbol of ego-consciousness with which people have most readily identified; he notes Lord Raglan’s count of twenty-two incidents and adds that the hero’s invariable maleness should be taken symbolically. Stein (1998) summarises Jung’s hero as the pattern that demands the sacrifice of a passive, childish attitude and belongs to women as much as men. Stevens (2003) gives it an evolutionary gloss: the dragon fight is every young person’s second birth out of the mother, and failure to win it is the mother complex.

The imaginal school dissents. Hillman (1975) treats the heroic attitude as one archetypal style among many, so habitual in the West that it has been mistaken for the ego itself. The emergent school has little use for an innate hero pattern; separation and return, on its account, are learnt from a life and a culture.

The sharper quarrel is with Campbell. The folklorist Alan Dundes, in his 2004 presidential address to the American Folklore Society (published 2005), dismissed Campbell’s universal hero as popular synthesis rather than folkloristics; his own hero work used Raglan’s list, and the three non-Jungian patterns (Rank, Raglan, Dundes) are collected in Segal’s In Quest of the Hero (1990). Barre Toelken’s The Dynamics of Folklore (1979, revised 1996) makes the general case that a tale’s meaning lives in its performance and community, which a universal skeleton strips away. Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey (1990) was written after she concluded that Campbell’s pattern did not describe women’s lives. None of these critics engages Jung’s hero directly; their target is the monomyth.

Empirical status

Narrow, on two studies that test different things. Maloney (1999) had 151 adults rate their preference for images chosen to represent archetypal themes and factor-analysed the ratings, reading the result as consistent with archetypal themes shaping affective response; the study is unreplicated, learnt and inherited preference cannot be told apart, and Jones (2000) disputed in the same journal that it proves anything about archetypes. Rogers and colleagues (2023) condensed Campbell’s stages to seven elements (protagonist, shift, quest, allies, challenge, transformation, legacy) and found, across eight studies with some 2,678 participants, that people whose life stories contained more of them reported more meaning in life, and that a brief “restorying” intervention raised meaning scores. That concerns narrative framing in autobiography, derived from Campbell rather than Jung; it says nothing about an inherited archetype and does not test Jung’s claim that the hero images the ego’s separation from the unconscious.

Appearances

Gilgamesh is the oldest. Rank includes him via Aelian’s infant Gilgamos; Campbell takes the quest for the plant of life as his example of the ultimate boon (Part I, chapter II, section 6). That reading is Campbell’s.

Perseus is Rank’s cleanest case of the saga: the oracle, Danaë shut away, mother and child cast into the sea in a box and drawn out by the fisherman Dictys. Jung’s reading adds the Gorgon as the paralysing aspect of the mother; Campbell uses Perseus only in his plates.

Beowulf’s fights with Grendel, Grendel’s mother and the dragon are the Germanic instance; neither Jung nor Campbell treats the poem, and Whitmont (1969) reads the killing of the swamp monster as the mythologem of the ego’s first power deed (Gummere’s translation is Gutenberg #981). The modern case most often cited, Star Wars, is Campbell reception rather than Jung: Segal (1990) notes that Campbell himself singled out the saga as a modern myth of space travel. In each case the hero is a reading laid over the text.

Sources

• Rank, O. (1909). The Myth of the Birth of the Hero: A Psychological Interpretation of Mythology (F. Robbins and S. E. Jelliffe, Trans., 1914). Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series 18. Project Gutenberg #66192.
• Jung, C. G. (1912). Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. English: Psychology of the Unconscious (B. M. Hinkle, Trans., 1916), Moffat, Yard. Project Gutenberg #65903. Part II, chapters IV, VI and VII.
• Jung, C. G. (1952). Symbols of Transformation. CW 5. ¶558 as quoted in Samuels (1985); ¶611 and ¶612, chapter “The Dual Mother”, as given by Sharp (1991).
• Jung, C. G. (1935). Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice (The Tavistock Lectures). CW 18, Lecture 3. Vintage edition (1968).
• Jung, C. G. (1939). The Integration of the Personality (S. Dell, Trans.). Farrar & Rinehart. Chapter on individual dream symbolism, revised into CW 12.
• Jung, C. G. (1940). The psychology of the child archetype. CW 9i ¶284, as given by Sharp (1991).
• Jung, C. G. (1944). Psychology and Alchemy. CW 12 ¶15; ¶437, Part III, chapter 4, section V, “The Myth of the Hero”.
• Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Fontana Press edition (1993), ISBN 978-0-586-08571-4. Prologue, section 3; Part I; note 35.
• Henderson, J. L. (1964). Ancient myths and modern man. In C. G. Jung (Ed.), Man and His Symbols. Dell edition, ISBN 978-0-440-35183-2.
• Whitmont, E. C. (1969). The Symbolic Quest: Basic Concepts of Analytical Psychology. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-02454-7. p. 241.
• Hillman, J. (1975). Re-Visioning Psychology. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-063931-0. Introduction.
• Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 978-0-415-05904-6. Chapter “The ego”.
• Sharp, D. (1991). Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-48-9. Entry “Hero”; online at https://www.jungpage.org/learn/jung-lexicon
• Raglan, FitzRoy R. S. (1936). The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama. Dover reprint, ISBN 978-0-486-42708-9.
• Segal, R. A. (Ed.) (1990). In Quest of the Hero. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-02062-4. Reprints Rank, Raglan and Dundes.
• Segal, R. A. (1990). The romantic appeal of Joseph Campbell. Christian Century, 4 April 1990, 332–335. https://www.religion-online.org/article/the-romantic-appeal-of-joseph-campbell/
• Toelken, B. (1979). The Dynamics of Folklore (rev. ed., 1996). Utah State University Press. ISBN 978-0-87421-203-7.
• Murdock, M. (1990). The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness. Shambhala. ISBN 978-0-87773-485-7.
• Stein, M. (1998). Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction. Open Court. ISBN 978-0-8126-9376-8. Chapter 3.
• Stevens, A. (2003). Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History of the Self. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-109-9. pp. 157–158.
• Dundes, A. (2005). Folkloristics in the twenty-first century (AFS invited presidential plenary address, 2004). Journal of American Folklore, 118(470), 385–408. https://doi.org/10.1353/jaf.2005.0044
• Maloney, A. (1999). Preference ratings of images representing archetypal themes: An empirical study of the concept of archetypes. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 44(1), 101–116. https://doi.org/10.1111/1465-5922.00070
• Jones, R. A. (2000). On the empirical proof of archetypes: Commentary on Maloney. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 45(4), 599–605. https://doi.org/10.1111/1465-5922.00196
• Rogers, B. A., Chicas, H., Kelly, J. M., Kubin, E., Christian, M. S., Kachanoff, F. J., Berger, J., Puryear, C., McAdams, D. P., and Gray, K. (2023). Seeing your life story as a Hero’s Journey increases meaning in life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 125(4), 752–778. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000341
• Beowulf (F. B. Gummere, Trans., 1910). Project Gutenberg #981.