archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Authored taxonomy · an archetype

Warrior (Pearson)

Stands where the line is drawn and does not step back.

Carol Pearson’s name for the stance of courage, discipline and principled struggle in her developmental scheme (1986; kept in her twelve, 1991). One stage of an authored sequence, not Jung’s hero, though Mark and Pearson renamed it Hero for brands (2001).

Pearson’s Warrior is the stance of courage and assertion: setting goals and keeping to them, defending one’s boundaries and other people, and fighting, when it is necessary, for what one believes. She calls it the figure most people picture when they think of a hero, the one who leaves a confining place, meets the dragon and protects the weak. Its development, on her account, runs from fighting simply to win towards fighting skilfully, and with respect for opponents, for ends that matter beyond the ego. Its shadow is the predatory fighter who uses force for its own sake.

Go deeper

At the threshold

Once more vnto the Breach,Deare friends, once more;Or close the Wall vp with our English dead:In Peace, there's nothing so becomes a man,As modest stillnesse, and humilitie:But when the blast of Warre blowes in our eares,Then imitate the action of the Tyger:Stiffen the sinewes, commune vp the blood,Disguise faire Nature with hard-fauour'd Rage:

Public domain · Shakespeare, Henry V, III.i (‘Once more vnto the Breach’) (1623)

The king’s call for rage in war names the warrior’s discipline: the body wound tight and the face made terrible for the breach.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 5 figures as a list
  1. a later reading

    Boromir

    Stifler, course reading of Pearson’s The Hero Within, 1954

    A course analysis of the Lord of the Rings films puts the Gondor captain at the Warrior stage.

  2. a later reading

    Beowulf

    SlideShare deck citing Pearson, c. 8th–11th century

    A teaching deck that cites Pearson lists the monster-slayer among Warrior figures.

  3. Jung’s example

    Superman

    Mark and Pearson, The Hero and the Outlaw, ch. 7, 1938

    The authors’ first example of the superhero as Hero, whose adversaries are classic Outlaws.

  4. Jung’s example

    Susan B. Anthony

    Mark and Pearson, The Hero and the Outlaw, ch. 7, 1850s–1900s

    A public figure the authors name, with John Wayne and John Glenn, to give a sense of the Hero.

  5. Jung’s example

    Nike

    Mark and Pearson, The Hero and the Outlaw, ch. 7, 1971

    The authors’ extended case study of a Hero brand, with its triumphs and its blind spot.

The wider sky

Where the Warrior (Pearson) has been seen

28 exemplars across 11 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!--An ecstasy of fumblingFitting the clumsy helmets just in time,But someone still was yelling out and stumblingAnd flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.--Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.In all my dreams before my helpless sightHe plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

Public domain · Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est (1920)

The stance pays at last in the body of one man drowning in gas: what the line costs the people standing in it.

Nobody was going to fight for him, and he has stopped minding.

The sword is lowered for a moment, only to be seen.

Victory is a quiet room where he cannot sleep.

The deep layer · what was written

Warrior (Pearson): the entry

Definition

Pearson’s Warrior is the stance of courage and assertion: setting goals and keeping to them, defending one’s boundaries and other people, and fighting, when it is necessary, for what one believes. She calls it the figure most people picture when they think of a hero, the one who leaves a confining place, meets the dragon and protects the weak. Its development, on her account, runs from fighting simply to win towards fighting skilfully, and with respect for opponents, for ends that matter beyond the ego. Its shadow is the predatory fighter who uses force for its own sake.

Pearson insists on two distinctions. The Warrior is not the macho man: a real warrior protects and dignifies others, where machismo keeps them down. And it belongs to women as much as men; any woman who wants equal rights or an identity of her own, she argues, needs it. In The Hero Within (1986) the Warrior is the fourth of six stages. In Awakening the Heroes Within (1991) it is one of the four archetypes of “preparation” that build the ego, and it is paired with the Caregiver as the two archetypes of adult responsibility, the protecting and the nurturing roles that each sex was once assigned and both are now expected to fill.

History

A warrior figure is in Pearson’s work before the scheme. Her preface to The Hero Within recalls that she and Katherine Pope, in Who Am I This Time? (1976), identified three heroic images for women, the sage, the artist and the warrior (1989 edition, p. xix). The Hero Within (Harper & Row, 1986) gave the Warrior chapter 4 (1989 edition, pp. 74ff.), and Awakening the Heroes Within (1991) chapter 8, whose notes lean on Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade (1987) for a critique of warrior cultures and on Chögyam Trungpa’s Shambhala teaching of the warrior without aggression. Pearson’s own name for the whole scheme, the hero’s journey, comes from Joseph Campbell, whose departure, initiation and return she maps onto her three stages (1991, chapter 1, note 2).

In The Hero and the Outlaw (2001) Mark and Pearson renamed the figure Hero and grouped it with the Outlaw and the Magician as identities that want to leave a mark on the world. The inventory built on the twelve kept “Warrior” through every form, including the 2020 revision (Blandin, Marr and Pearson, 2021, p. 11), and Pearson’s Warrior page lists subtypes such as the competitor, the dragon slayer and the crusader, but not the hero. The shared history of the lineage is in the framework rows for Pearson’s six, her twelve and the brand archetypes.

The debate

The brand renaming invites the confusion this site exists to untangle. Jung’s hero (see the hero entry) is a personification of psychic energy and of the ego’s struggle to win consciousness from the unconscious, first set out in 1912; Campbell’s hero is the subject of the whole monomyth, departure to return. For Pearson every stance in the sequence is heroic, and the Warrior is only the one most people mistake for the whole. Calling it “Hero” in 2001 made one of twelve brand identities carry the name of the entire journey, so that marketing guides now present “the Hero archetype” as if it were Jung’s. Faber and Mayer (2009), building a research instrument from several theorists, merged the two outright as “Hero (or Warrior)”, treating the figure as one of those most consistent across authors, which shows how easily the distinction is lost.

The Warrior is also the most politically charged of Pearson’s figures. She wrote the 1986 book partly against Campbell, whose great book on the hero, she says, assumed either that the hero was male or that male and female heroism were the same (1989, p. xx). Her Warrior is therefore a deliberately ungendered and ethical revision of the warrior-hero, and her 1991 chapter argues that what the world needs is not fewer warriors but warriors of a higher level. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s Warrior (1990), from the men’s movement, uses the same word with a different claim: a mature masculine energy with sadistic and masochistic shadow poles. The two are separate lineages and are recorded as such. None of these warriors is an archetype in Jung’s sense, which concerns unconscious forms, and Pearson did not claim it was; she said her list concerned the archetypes active in conscious life (1989, p. xxvii).

Empirical status

Narrow. The Warrior is one of the steadier scales of the inventory built on Pearson’s list, which began as a thirty-six-item questionnaire in The Hero Within (1989 edition, pp. 197–201) and became the Pearson–Marr indicator after Hugh Marr’s 1995 dissertation. Its alpha was reported as 0.70 in the original manual (Pearson and Marr, as reported by du Toit and Coetzee, 2012) and 0.74 in 5,000 records analysed for the 2021 manual. In that manual’s factor analysis it was one of only three scales whose six items loaded on their own factor and on no other, though it correlated 0.43 with the Ruler scale (Blandin, Marr and Pearson, 2021, pp. 15, 18–19). In Faber and Mayer’s study (2009) the Hero clustered with the Ruler in a group they called the Striver. These results describe how a self-report scale behaves, reported largely by its authors and publisher on a convenience sample with no test–retest study of the current form. They do not show that the Warrior is an archetype in Jung’s sense, and the site does not present the scale as validated.

Appearances

Pearson’s own examples in the 1991 chapter are generals and giant-killers, Alexander, Napoleon, Washington and David against Goliath, and women warriors from the Amazons to Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth. Ann Moseley (1999), applying the six to Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock (1931), read Count Frontenac as the Warrior. Under its brand name the figure has become the commonest label in marketing writing on archetypes, where “the Hero” is routinely attributed to Jung; the name is Mark and Pearson’s. All of these are readings made after the fact, in Pearson’s vocabulary.

Sources

  • Pearson, C., & Pope, K. (Eds.). (1976). Who Am I This Time? Female Portraits in British and American Literature. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-049032-1.
  • Pearson, C. S. (1986). The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-86683-527-5.
  • Pearson, C. S. (1989). The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By (expanded ed.; copyright 1986, 1989). Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-254862-7. Pp. xix–xx, xxvii, 74, 197–201, read in the Internet Archive copy: https://archive.org/details/herowithin002330mbp
  • Pearson, C. S. (1991). Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World. HarperSanFrancisco. ISBN 978-0-06-250678-8. Chapters 1, 8 and 18 and notes, read in the HarperCollins e-book (2012), ISBN 978-0-06-223800-9, which has no page numbers.
  • Mark, M., & Pearson, C. S. (2001). The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0-07-136415-7. Chapter on the Hero (p. 106, as cited in Faber & Mayer, 2009, Table 1).
  • Pearson, C. S. Warrior archetype page. https://carolspearson.com/archetype-pages/warrior-archetype
  • Pearson, C. S., & Marr, H. K. (2003). PMAI Manual: A Guide for Interpreting the Pearson-Marr Archetype Indicator Instrument. Center for Applications of Psychological Type. ISBN 978-0-935652-74-1. Dated 2002 in the 2021 manual; cited as reported by du Toit & Coetzee (2012).
  • Blandin, K., Marr, H. K., & Pearson, C. S. (2021). PMAI Manual. Center for Applications of Psychological Type. Pp. 11, 13–19. https://assets.website-files.com/5fc7fbb375805cc285353295/65d8ffa286160b97014347f7_PMAI_Manual_2021-1.pdf
  • du Toit, D.-M., & Coetzee, M. (2012). Archetypal values of science and engineering staff in relation to their career orientations. SA Journal of Industrial Psychology, 38(1), art. 955. https://doi.org/10.4102/sajip.v38i1.955
  • Faber, M. A., & Mayer, J. D. (2009). Resonance to archetypes in media: there’s some accounting for taste. Journal of Research in Personality, 43(3), 307–322. Pp. 309–310, 316. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2008.11.003
  • Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press; commemorative ed. 2004. ISBN 978-0-691-11924-3.
  • Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1990). King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine. HarperSanFrancisco. ISBN 978-0-06-250597-2.
  • Eisler, R. (1987). The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250287-2.
  • Moseley, A. (1999). “The Hero Within”: heroic archetypes in Shadows on the Rock. Cather Studies 4. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-6398-7. https://cather.unl.edu/scholarship/catherstudies/4/cs004.moseley

Leaving

Beat! beat! drums!--blow! bugles! blow!Through the windows--through doors--burst like a ruthless force,Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,Into the school where the scholar is studying;Leave not the bridegroom quiet--no happiness must he have now with his bride,Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,So fierce you whirr and pound you drums--so shrill you bugles blow.

Public domain · Whitman, Beat! Beat! Drums! (1861)

The drums and bugles break into church, school and field alike, a call to arms that asks nobody’s leave.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey⚔ HeroConsciousness, fighting its way out of the dark.Return to the void