Who was Joseph Campbell?

            Joseph Campbell was born in 1903, a year after Jung graduated and published his thesis. Campbell got a Master’s from Columbia University in literature in 1927. During his time there, he had the chance to study in Europe. When he came back, the depression had hit. With no job prospects, he rented a cheap house in Woodstock, New York and began reading for nine hours a day. In his reading, he noticed the recurrence of similar patterns in stories, in images, in religions, etc. This closely paralleled Jung’s ideas of archetypes. The title of one book by Campbell is The Hero with a Thousand Faces, showing how there is an archetype of the hero’s story, be it Scheherazade, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Beowulf, The Three Musketeers, or Luke Skywalker. By relating archetypes to common stories, images, and religions, Campbell brought Jung’s ideas to a broader audience. Bill Moyers’s interviews with Campbell on PBS in the late 1980s became one of the most viewed series at that time.

            Campbell also argued that many mythological stories were like guides, prescriptions for living. Similarly, archetypes help you when needed or activated as “systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emotions.” Campbell described religious fundamentalists as getting caught in the prose and not the poetry of religious writings. To believe that Jesus rose from the dead, Mary had a virgin birth, etc., is to ask the impossible in a scientific era. Instead, one should focus on the metaphor involved with such stories.

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Who was James Hillman?

            James Hillman wrote a book titled We’ve Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. I think that’s as good a place as any to start describing him. He studied at the Jung Institute in Zurich and was director of studies there for 10 years. He thought the work of therapy was to focus on soul, and images as the voice of the soul. The archetypes of Jung and the psychic states such as depression were symptoms of something going on at a deeper level: Soul. Rather than trying to “heal” such situations (in terms of making them go away), he argued that we should explore what such symptoms point to as needing to be addressed in the soul.

            One of my favorite diatribes by Hillman involves a hypothetical patient coming in and sitting there depressed and angry. He notes that a traditional therapy session would then go into “Well, let’s explore that. Let’s look at your childhood. Let’s try to get you so you don’t feel depressed and angry. What do you think about your personality might make you inclined to be depressed and angry?” Hillman counters with “Why do we blame the patient? Why shouldn’t we expect our patients to be depressed and angry? The food in the supermarkets is artificial. Maybe somebody cut him off in traffic on the way to his appointment. Maybe we can use the depression and the anger as a way to get the patient engaged with the world and community again.

            His insistence on the rock bottom truth of psychic elements as symptoms trying to indicate something needing healing in the personal and world soul led to a break with many traditional therapists.

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Did Jung anticipate the new theory of panpsychism?

I recently read an article about the latest evidence supporting panpsychism, the theory that the entire world is conscious. The findings were from a study of dissociative (multiple) personalities. I was also re-reading Jung and found this sentence: “But even the soberest formulation of the phenomenology of complexes cannot get round the impressive fact of their autonomy, and the deeper one penetrates into their nature – I might almost say into their biologythe more clearly do they reveal their character as splinter psyches.

So, the biology of what creates our psyches (the brain, etc.) is inclined to produce many different psyches. If you read the article linked above on the word “article,” you will see that the scientists proposed the theory that each of us (and literally everything) is a separate personality of the universal consciousness.

A while ago I saw a video of Thomas Moore, a “creation theologian.” In it, he noted that the only thing we know about consciousness is that living things have it. But we know living things are carbon-based. So by the transitive property, how do we know it is not carbon that thinks?


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What is the Archetype Puer Aeternus (The Flying Boy)?

            Puer aeternus is Latin for “eternal boy,” and it refers to a personality for the type of man who never grows up emotionally. Some say there is a related archetype for women: puella aeternus. It is called the flying boy because the person is always trying to “fly away” (escape) from adult-life entanglements: jobs, relationships, debts, etc. Also, many examples of this archetype are associated with wings or flying: The Roman god Mercury (Greek Hermes), with his winged helmet and winged ankles; Peter Pan, who escapes into a fantasyland; Icarus, who was warned not to fly too close to the sun with his feather wings held together with wax, but did and fell; the Little Prince, who lives on a distant planet and meets an aviator; etc. In its positive aspects, the puer is able to create lots of new things and helps in transformations of other people and things into new manifestations. Hermes invented the lyre (forerunner of guitars) out of a turtle. The archetype is also the messenger of the gods or bridge to God (psychopomp). Hermes/Mercury also has a symbol associated with the healing arts and with commerce: the caduceus, a staff entwined by two snakes. He happened upon two snakes fighting or copulating (depending on the version) and separated them with a staff, then rejoined them with the staff. So he was associated with healing and bringing peace and also with ambiguous sexual identity.

            So if you meet someone who is always looking for something new, just know they can help you to move onto another stage of your life…but they probably won’t be there with you for that new stage.

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