“..we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero path.  And where we have thought to find an abomination, we shall find god; where we have thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we have thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; and where we have thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”

-Joseph Campbell

What is Hero Psychology?

It’s basically the combination of psychological and mythological theory, which I’ve used to help explain the stages of development that may occur between the stages of psychosocial development as outlined by Psycho-analyst Erik Erickson. 

It starts with the monomyth and  mythological viewpoint that says similar themes appear in almost all myths throughout the world because they are universal to human nature and inherent in our psycho-biological make-up.  Mythologist Joseph Campbell held this view, and like the famed psychiatrists Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, believed myths to be dreamlike, “symbols, which evoke and direct psychic energy.”  Campbell thought of myths as the “the public dream, and dreams as the private myth.”  And like Jung believed that myths are the  “vehicles of communication between the conscious and unconscious mind, just as dreams are.”   

Campbell outlined four basic functions of myths: the cosmological, pedagogical, sociological, and finally the psychological which he believed, “guides the individual, stage by stage, through the inevitable psychological crises of life: from the childhood condition of dependency through the traumas of adolescence and the trials of adulthood, and finally, the deathbed.”  This is achieved by a standard pattern of the mythological hero’s quest, the monomyth, which has three basic stages; separation, initiation, and return.

From there, I made another interesting association with Marcia’s Identity statuses.  I placed each of his four statuses in the corresponding section of the hero cycle.  The hero in this case becomes the adolescent who is actively searching for his or herself in the identity moratorium state, and the completed hero journey is the adolescent with the achieved identity.  As Marcia pointed out, the achieved identity status requires both exploration and commitment, and the thresholds are replaced by exploration and commitment. 

Finally, I then put them all together in one collective monomyth identity quest, occurring between Erikson’s fifth (Identity VS. Role confusion) and sixth stages (Intimacy VS. Isolation).