Campbell, J. (2008). The hero with a thousand faces (3rd ed.). New World Library. ~

PART I: THE ADVENTURE OF THE HERO

Ch. 1: Departure

1: The Call to Adventure

This is an example of one of the ways in which the adventure can begin. A blunder–apparently the merest chance–reveals an unexpected world, and the individual is drawn into a relationship with forces that are not rightly understood. As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. (42)

The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny. (42)

The familiar life horizon has been outgrown; the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand. (43)

Typical of the circumstances of the call are the dark forest, the great tree, the babbling spring, and the loathly, underestimated appearance of the carrier of the power of destiny. (43)

The herald or anounder of the adventure, therefore, is often dark, loathly, or terrifying, judged evil by the world; yet if one could follow, the way would be opened through the walls of day into the dark where the jewels glow. Ot the herald is a beast (as in the fairy tale), representative of the repressed instinctual fecundity within ourselves, or again a veiled mysterious figure–the unknown. (44) #glossary

Whether dream or myth, in these adventures there is an atmosphere of irresistible fascination about the figure that appears suddenly as a guide, marking a new period, a new stage, in the biography. (46)

The first stage of the mythological journey–which we have designated the “call to adventure”–signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. (48)

2: Refusal of the Call

Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. (49)

One is harassed, both day and night, by the divine being that is the image of the living self within the locked labyrinth of one’s own disoriented psyche. The ways to the gates have all been lost: there is no exit. (50)

Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required. So it is that sometimes the predicament following an obstinate refusal of the call proves to be the occasion of a providential revelation of some unsuspected principle of release. (53)

The sole problem is what the machinery of the miracle is to be. (56)

3: Supernatural Aid

For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass. (57)

The fantasy is a reassurance–a promise that the peace of Paradise, which was known first within the mother womb, is not to be lost; that it supports the present and stands in the future as well as in the past (is omega as well as alpha); that though omnipotence may seem to be endangered by the threshold passages and life awakenings, protective power is always and ever present within the sanctuary of the heart and even immanent within, or just behind, the unfamiliar features of the world. One has only to know and trust, and the ageless guardians will appear. Having responded to his own call, and continuing to follow courageously as the consequences unfold, the hero finds all the forces of the unconscious at his side. Mother Nature herself supports the mighty task. (59)

Not infrequently, the supernatural helper is masculine in form. In fairy lore it may be some little fellow of the wood, some wizard, hermit, shepherd, or smith, who appears, to supply the amulets and advice that the hero will require. (59)

And so, incidentally to something going on in a zone of which he was entirely unconscious, the destiny of life-reluctant Kamar-al-Zaman began to fulfill itself, without the cooperation of his conscious will. (63)

4: The Crossing of the First Threshold

The folk mythologies populate with deceitful and dangerous presences every desert place outside the normal traffic of the village. (64)

The regions of the unknown (desert, jungle, deep dea, alien land, etc.) are free fields for the projection of unconscious content. (65)

The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that (67) watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades. (68)

Such demons–at once dangers and bestowers of magic power–every hero must encounter who steps an inch outside the walls of his tradition. (68)

5: The Belly of the Whale

The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died. (74)

The hero whose attachment to ego is already annihilate passes back and forth across the horizons of the world, in and out of the dragon, as readily as a king through all the rooms of his house. And therein lies his power to save; for his passing and returning demonstrate that through all the contraries of phenomenality the Uncreate-Imperishable remains, and there is nothing to fear. (78)

Ch. 2: Initiation

The Road of Trials

In the vocabulary of the mystics this is the seconds stage of the Way, that of the “purification of the self,” when the senses are “cleansed and humbled,” and the energies and interests “concentrated upon transcendental things”; or in a vocabulary of more modern turn: this is the process of dissolving, transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of our personal past. In our dreams the ageless perils, gargoyles, trials, secret helpers, and instructive figures are nightly still encountered; and in their forms we may see (84) reflected not only the whole picture of our present case, but also the clue to what we must do to be saved. (85)

The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth or the dreamer of a dream, discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed. One by one the resistances are broken. He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty, and life, and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable. Then he finds that he and his opposite are not of differing species, but one flesh. (89)

The ordeal is a deepening of the problem of the first threshold and the question is still in balance: Can the ego put itself to death? For many-headed is this surrounding Hydra; one head cut off, two more appear–unless the right cause is applied to the mutilated (89) stump. The original departure into the land of trials represented only the beginning of the long and really perilous path of initiator conquests and moments of illumination. Dragons have now to be slain and surprising barriers passed–again, again, and again. Meanwhile there will be a multitude of preliminary victories, unretainable ecstasies, and momentary glimpses of the wonderful land. (90)

The Meeting with the Goddess

She was Cosmic Power, the totality of the universe, the harmonization of all the pairs of opposites, combining wonderfully the terror of absolute destruction with an impersonal yet motherly reassurance. (95)

As change, the river of time, the fluidity of life, the goddess at once creates, preserves, and destroys. (96)

Woman is the guide to the sublime acme of sensuous adventure. By deficient eyes she is reduced to inferior states; by the evil eye of ignorance she is spellbound to banality and ugliness. But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding. (97)

Woman as the Temptress

Nevertheless, every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late. (101)

The individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls. Who and where are his ogres? Those are the reflections of the unresolved enigmas of his own humanity. What are his ideals? Those are the symptoms of his grasp of life. (101)

The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom correspond to what life really is. Generally we refuse to admit within ourselves, or within our friends, the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very nature of the organic cell. (101)

Where this Oedipus-Hamlet revulsion remains to beset the soul, there the world, the body, and woman above all become the symbols no longer of victory but of defeat. A monastic-puritanical, world-negating ethical system then radically and immediately transfigures all the images of myth. (102)

Atonement with the Father

The magic of the sacraments… the protective power of primitive amulets and charms, and the supernatural helpers of the myths and fairy tales of the world, are mankind’s assurances that the arrow, the flames, and the flood are not as brutal as they seem. (107)

But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself; and that is what is difficult. One must have a faith that the father is merciful, and then a reliance on that mercy. Therewith, the center of belief is transferred outside of the bedeviling god’s tight scaly ring, nd the dreadful ogres dissolve. (110)

For if it is impossible to trust the terrifying father-face, then one’s faith must be centered elsewhere (Spider Woman, Blessed Mother); and with that reliance for support, one endures the crisis–only to find, in the end, that the father and mother reflect each other, and are in essence the same. (110)

The door was guarded by two bears. These arose and growled; but the words that Spider Woman had taught the boys made the animals crouch down again. After the bears, there threatened a pair of serpents, then winds, then lightnings: the guardians of the ultimate threshold. All were readily appeased, however, with the words of the prayer. (110)

111 – four symbolical colors

This tale of indulgent parenthood illustrates the antique idea that when the roles of life are assumed by the improperly initiated, chaos supervenes. (115)

Whether he knows it or not, and no matter what his position in society, the father is the initiating priest through whom the young being passes on into the larger world. And just as, formerly, the mother represented the “good” an “evil,” so now does he, but with this complication–that there is a new element of rivalry in the picture: the son against the father for the mastery of the universe, and the daughter against the mother to be the mastered world. (115)

The mystery of the apparently self-contradictory father is rendered tellingly in the figure of a great divinity of prehistoric Peru, named Viracocha. His tiara is the sun; he grasps a thunderbolt in either hand; and from his eyes descend, in the form of tears, the rains that refresh the life of the valleys of the world. Viracocha is the Universal God, the creator of all things; and yet, in the legends of his appearances upon the earth, he is shown wandering as a beggar, in rags and reviled. (123)

The meaning is that the grace that pours into the universe through the sun door is the same as the energy of the bolt that annihilates and is itself indestructible: the delusion-shattering light of the imperishable is the same as the light that creates. Or again, in terms of a secondary polarity of nature: the fire blazing in the sun glows also in the fertilizing storm; the energy behind the elemental pair of opposites, fire and water, is one and the same. (124)

The paradox of creation, the coming of the forms of time out of eternity, is the germinal secret of the father. It can never be quite explained. Therefore, in every system of theology there is an umbilical point, an Achilles tendon which the finger of mother life has touched, and where the possibility of perfect knowledge has been (124) impaired. The problem of the hero is to pierce himself (and therewith his world) precisely through that point; to shatter and annihilate that key knot of his limited existence. (125)

The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands–and the two are atoned. (125)

Apotheosis

Pain and pleasure do not enclose him, he encloses them–and with profound repose. And since he is what all of us may be, his presence, his image, the mere naming of him, helps. (129)

In China and Japan this sublimely gentle Bodhisattva is represented not only in male form, but also as female. (129)

What is understood is that time and eternity are two aspects of the same experience–whole, two places of the same nondual ineffable; i.e, the jewel of eternity is in the lotus of birth and death: om mani padme hum. (130)

Male-female gods are not uncommon in the world of myth. They emerge always with a certain mysteryl for they conduct the mind beyond objective experience into a symbolic realm where duality is left behind. (131)

The kabbalistic teachings of the medieval Jews, as well as the Gnostic Christian writings of the second century, represent the Word Made Flesh as androgynous–what was indeed the state of Adam as he was created, before the female aspect, Eve, was removed into another form. And among the Greeks, not only Hermaphrodite (the child of Hermes and Aphrodite), but Eros too, the divinity of love (the first of the gods, according to Plato), were in sex both female and male. (131)

This is the biblical version of a myth known to many lands. It represents one of the basic ways of symbolizing the mystery of creation: the development of eternity into time, the breaking of the one into the two and then the many, as well as the generation of new life through the reconjuction of the two. This image stands at the beginning of the cosmogonic cycle, and with equal priority at the conclusion of the (131) hero-task, at the moment when the wall of Paradise is dissolved, the divine form found and recollected, and wisdom regained. (132)

The call of the Great Father Snake was alarming to the child; the mother was protection. But the father came. He was the guide and initiator into the mysteries of the unknown. As the original intruder into the paradise of the infant with its mother, the father is the archetypal enemy; hence, throughout life all enemies are symbolical (to the unconscious) of the father. (133)

Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively missionizing cults represent only partial solutions of the psychological problem of subduing hate by love; they only partially initiate. Ego is not annihilated in them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of thinking only of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the whole of his society. (133)

We are all reflexes of the image of the Bodhisattva. The sufferer ithin us is that divine being. We and that protecting father are one. This is the redeeming insight. That protecting father is every man we meet. And so it must be known that, though this ignorant, limited, self-defending, suffering body may regard itself as threatened by some other–the enemy–that one too is the God. (137)

This is the meaning of the image of the bisexual god. He is the mystery of the theme of initiation. We are taken from the mother, chewed into fragments, and assimilated to the world-annihilating body of the ogre for whom all the precious forms and beings are only the courses of a feast; but then, miraculously reborn, we are more than we were…. We no longer desire and fear; we are what was desired and feared. (138)

This is the sense of the first wonder of the Bodhisattva: the androgynous character of the presence. Therewith the two apparently opposite mythological adventures come together: the Meeting with the Goddess, and the Atonement with the Father. (138)

And he is filled with compassion for the self-terrorized beings who live in fright of their own nightmare. He rises, returns to them, and dwells with them as an egoless center, through whom the principle of emptiness is made manifest in its own simplicity. (141)

Those who know, not only that the Everlasting lives in them but that what they, and all things, really are is the Everlasting, dwell in the groves of the wish-fulfilling trees, drink the brew of immortality, and listen everywhere to the unheard music of eternal concord. These are the immortals. (142)

The teahouse is called “the abode of the unsymmetrical”: the unsymmetrical suggests movement; the purposely unfinished leaves a vacuum into which the imagination of the beholder can pour. (143)

The simplest object, framed by the controlled simplicity of the teahouse, stands out in mysterious beauty, its silence holding the secret of temporal existence. (143)

“The plants, rocks, fire, water, all are alive. They watch us and see our needs. They see when we have nothing to protect us,” declared an old Apache storyteller, “and it is then that they reveal themselves and speak to us.” This is what the Buddhist calls “the sermon of the inanimate.” (144)

Or on the other hand, the male figure may be regarded as symbolizing the initiating principle, the method; in which case the female denotes the goal to which initiation leads. (145)

6. The Ultimate Boon

Casement (1991) Learning from the Patient

Casement, P. J. (1991). Learning from the patient. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

Ch. 4: Forms of Interactive Communication

Patients often behave in such a way that they stir up feelings in the therapist which could not be communicated in words. I have found it useful to consider this form of interaction under a general heading of communication by impact. (64)

In psychotherapy, therapists are often subjected to the unspoken cries of those who come to consult them. (65)

Even when she was talking of the children’s illness, and slow dying, she showed no feelings at all. But my own feelings, upon listening to her, were nearly overwhelming me. I was literally crying inside. I wondered about my response. I knew I would be moved by any account of a child’s death. Was this some personal countertransference problem, only to do with me? I had to consider* this as a real possibility. But, as I looked into this further, I began to realize why I was being so affected. If Mrs. T. had been crying her own tears I would not be feeling so overwhelmed. What was producing this effect upon me had something to do with her inability to show any expression of her own feelings (69)

It is possible that each person carries the potential to feel all feelings and to resonate to all experiences, however strange or alien these may be to their conscious selves; but, whenever there are unresolved areas of repression or continued disavowal, there will continue to be degrees of feeling that remain deadened and unresponsive. The expanding of a therapist’s range of empathic resonance is a major gain from analysis, and this needs to be a continuing process (82).

Ch. 6: Key Dynamics of Containment

I am using the notion of containment here as a general term for the management of another person’s difficult feelings, which are otherwise uncontained. (112) #glossary

It is only when these feelings can be admitted within a relationship that the underlying fantasy can begin to be modified (112)

Containment is seldom, if ever, achieved by reassuring the patient. (114)

In order to find a way of containing this patient, it had been essential that I could recognize the unconscious hope expressed in the patient’s behavior. (121)

At such moments it is also difficult to put into practice another maxim of technique, that “the best containment is a good interpretation.” That means being able to make sense of what a patient is saying and feeling, and able to convey this to the patient. It also implies good timing. If an interpretation is accurate in content but poorly timed, it is a bad interpretation; it can even be experienced by the patient as persecutory. (127)

Patients have taught me that when I allow myself to feel (even to be invaded by) the patient’s own unbearable feelings, and ifI can experience this (paradoxically) as both unbearable and yet bearable, so that I am still able to find some way of going on, I can begin to “defuse” the dread in a patient’s most difficult feelings. (128)

 

This too shall pass