An Introduction to the Hero's Journey

4. Carl Jung

1875-1961; A protege of Freud considered a neo-Freudian. He theorized that people had conscious and unconscious awareness; he felt that people related to archetypical stories and people because of the collective unconscious.

6. Archetype

A detail, image, or character type that occurs frequently in literature and myth and is thought to appeal in a universal way to the unconscious and to evoke a response.

8. Metaphor

A figure of speech in which one thing is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity. When it comes to myths, the story of the myth compares to your world. The hero in the story is not you literally, it is a metaphor for who you could be and for what you could do. Our ability to think metaphorically allows us to put ourselves in the hero's shoes and win his/her battles and suffer his/her defeats.

11. Paradigm

A model or pattern; worldview, set of shared assumptions, values, etc. In the hero's journey, the hero must leave an old paradigm behind and figure out the new one that he/she's entered. Victory means mastering the new paradigm.

9. Motiff

A reoccurring subject, theme, idea, in a literary work. Campbell found similarities in myths that certain motiffs emerge when one steps back and looks at all myths from a distance.

7. Myth

A traditional story passed from generation to generation that attempts to explain the unexplainable. Myths are religious at their core and contain super-natural beings and experiences.

3. Sigmund Freud

Austrian physician whose work focused on the unconscious causes of behavior and personality formation;he founded psychoanalysis. Many of his theories have been debunked, but he is a lasting influence in the fields of art and literature.

2. Mono-myth/Hero's Journey

Campbell's ideas myths across time are essentially the same story with a common template that involves a hero who goes on an adventure, and in a decisive crisis wins a victory, and then comes home changed or transformed

10. Theme

Central idea of a work of literature. The monomyth contains the idea that the individual must rise against outside forces to attain victory for himself and his people. If we interpret the myth as a metaphor, we find the forces that one has to rise above are within the individual.

5. Collective Unconcious

In Jung's theory, the hypothesized part of the unconscious mind that is inherited from previous generations and that contains universally shared ancestral experiences and ideas. Joseph Campbell seized on this idea in his theory of the monomyth. He reasoned that if we share a collective unconcious from across history, it would make sense that we keep retelling ourselves the same stories.

1. Joseph Campbell

an American mythologist, writer and lecturer whose book The Hero With a Thousand Faces outlines his theory of the Monomyth.