the timboucher experience

I don’t know why I didn’t post this way back when I typed it a few weeks back. I think I was under the impression that I was going to come back to it and flesh it out in more detail. But reading it again, I think it’s complete enough for right now, at least to be posted in here, so I can keep it in the front of my memory.

Anyway, it involves looking at Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” from a slightly different perspective than I have seen anybody else do. Basically, everybody talks about how its a “Monomyth,” that is, it’s the one story that all our stories have been telling since the dawn of time. Myself, I don’t really agree entirely with that assessment, although I do find it interesting. The way I want to look at it is from the perspective of thinking about how the Hero’s Journey represents stages of integration of new psychic components.

Now that introductions are out of the way, here it is:

That at the beginning of the journey, the hero’s world is stable, if incomplete. Their existing life is their story-system. Some new content presents itself which cannot be successfully integrated into the existing story-system. ie, it is seen as an enemy or as a threat. In order to combat this threat, the individual is taken outside the realm of his story-system. That is, he goes on the hero’s journey. In so doing, he leaves his normal realm, and encounters various psychic trials and aids which serve to transform his thinking-emotional processes enough so that he may integrate the new content. At the conclusion of his quest, when he “vanquishes the monster” it means that he releases it from its form. By releasing it from its form, that of an enemy, it then becomes absorbed into his system of knowledge as a whole. The boon which he then gains is a transformed version of the monster itself. It has been transformed from a monster, which has only a destructive role in his story-system to that of a treasure, which has beneficial results for the world he exists in. He can then return to his story-system, but it will have been changed by his individual experiences, and his final integration with the outside content.

I will come back and develop this some time.

• The Hero With A Thousand Faces
• Joseph Campbell and the Synoptic Monomyth
• Hero’s Journey & Star Wars
• is updating his Heroes List.
• In No Doubt About Their Request