Pop Culture One: The Heroes Journey

Today, in the final entry of our week discussing the Mesopotamian creation myth and in our first Pop Culture post, I want to start somewhere a little unusual — the ideological split that drove a wedge between Freud and Jung.

Modern people don’t like the take Freud all too seriously and I think it is a mistake. Freud receives rotten and ungrateful treatment in modern academia. At the core of this slight is, I believe, the fact that all of Freud’s major insights were so profound that they slipped into the modern consciousness and all that is really left to his name is the post sorting chaff. We take for granted much of what Freud discovered and give him credit only for his mistakes.

This said, there are valid and intelligent criticisms of Freud and Carl Jung is probably the best example of them. It is often said that Freud discovered the basement of the human mind and when he showed it to Jung, Jung started drilling through the floor.

There were several areas of disagreement between the two. Freud emphasized a personal unconscious driven by repressed sexual and aggressive instincts. He argued that the  libido is the primary motivator of human behavior with the unconscious as a repository for repressed conflict and desire. Jung saw it in a more sophisticated manner. Seeing the unconscious as both a Freudian personal unconscious but also a collective unconscious containing universal archetypes shared across humanity, inherited from ancestral experience working together on the individual psyche.

Further, Jung disagreed with Freud about libido suggesting that Freud was too narrow in his scope and that libido was a general psychic energy not limited to sexuality and encompassing broader drives like creativity, spirituality and self-realization. Jung also dismantled Freud’s dismissive view of religion as an illusion, a projection of psychological needs valuing religion and spirituality as essential for psychological growth, seeing archetypes and myths as expressions of the collective unconscious.

All of those disputes aside, it is this last one that I believe is the most important and which will lead us into the topic of the day. The dispute is based on the human meta-narrative. A meta- narrative is a broad, overarching story or framework which seeks to explain and organize human experiences, beliefs and knowledge within a culture or society. You can think of a meta-narrative as “the big picture” as it offers a comprehensive truth, story or understanding of reality which shapes how people interpret history, morality, social structures and themselves. You can think of everything in life being one form of a micro-narrative or another but all of those micro-narratives are informed by and a product of the overarching meta-narrative.

For Freud, the meta-narrative of humanity revolves around the Oedipal Complex, which he argues is a central organizing principle of human psychological development. I think it is safe to say that most people have heard the

term Oedipal Complex but are likely fuzzy on the details and often get caught up in the colloquial telling of the desire to have sexual relations with ones mother. Let’s start by instantly dispensing with this juvenile understanding of an incredibly sophisticated bit of theory.

In the Oedipal Complex you will find that a child and mother have a codependent relationship with the mother offering juvenile satiation, safety and escape from danger under the guise of compassion. It is the logical limit of not wanting your children to get hurt. The child, unable or unwilling to escape the confines of the safe life created by the mother co-creates a pathological relationship. For Freud, the escape from or succumbing to this relationship was the meta-narrative that drove all of humanity.

For Jung (later popularized by Joseph Campbell) it is the Hero’s Journey as part of a connection to the collective unconscious that is the meta-narrative which is guiding humanity. The Hero’s Journey archetype is a departure from the ordinary world due to a call to adventure. The call is refused by the hesitant hero who then meets a mentor and crosses a threshold. After this departure there is the initiation. This includes tests, meeting allies and encountering enemies (shadow manifestation…we will get deeper into the Jungian shadow in the weeks to come). This is followed by what Jung calls the “approach to the inmost cave” or the place of danger where the shadow resides. This will set up an ordeal where the hero must confront the shadow (their own fears, flaws and inner darkness) and goes through a symbolic death and rebirth. The hero rejects the oedipal situation rather than codeveloping the pathology.

Finally, after the departure and initiation there is the return. The hero returns to the ordinary world, often facing further challenges and will eventually find a final test where the hero applies their newfound wisdom, achieves a transformation and integration and returns with the treasure. Home remains ever the same, but the transformation of the hero means he has sacrificed his oneness with that home in order to save it. The hero who saves his home through the courageous journey is barred from a return.

If the Jungian story seems familiar it should. It is every single story ever told by man.

So how do we see the conflict between Jung and Freud? Noted psychologist Julius E. Heuscher (A Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales: Their Origin, Meaning, and Usefulness 1963) points to many of our popular myths, but he may be most known for his discussion of the dispute between Freud’s Oedipal Complex and Jung’s Heroes Journey (which may be considered the positive Oedipal escape, but that is a topic for another post) with regard to Sleeping Beauty.

In Sleeping Beauty King Stephan and Queen Leah, in their old age, are desperate to have a child. When Princess Aurora is born they consider it a blessing and work hard to protect her. The King and Queen throw a large party to

celebrate the birth of their daughter, but in their overprotective manner do not invite Maleficent. Freud once said that the good mother always fails. The maternal instinct to protect a child, in order for that child to mature, needs to fail allowing the child to express individuality. Of course the King and Queen do not want to invite Maleficent (or maleficence) to the party. If all you want from you child is to protect them from the dangers of the world you do not invite in Maleficent –Geppetto from Pinocchio is the exact opposite of the King and Queen as he wishes for his puppet to be a real live boy.

The problem is, you can’t just not invite Maleficent to the party. This is life, she crashes no matter how hard you try to keep her away. Now, she is not only Maleficent but she is angry about not being invited and if there is one thing worse than the personification of maleficence it is the personification of maleficence when she is angry. And so Maleficent curses Princess Aurora that on her 16th birthday she will prick her finger on a spinning wheel and die at the age of sixteen.. This is what the tragedy of life does when someone tries to keep it at bay, it comes anyway — and is angry and brings a curse.

The Princess is sent into the forest with three fairy caretakers who are toothless and harmless, just as the oedipal mother wants it and the King orders all the spinning wheels destroyed (yes, its the same as Captain Hook afraid of

the alligator with a clock in his stomach who has already taken a piece of him). The Fairies keep the Princess unaware about her royal heritage and she meets Prince Phillip in the forest.  In a state of naive ignorance she is unaware she is a princess and unaware he is betrothed to her. The Princess is lured by Maleficent to a surviving spinning wheel (because like snakes in paradise, the walls never keep them all out) and she pricks her finger and falls asleep. Keep in mind, since Heraclitus in the 6th Century BC  the Hellenic poets and philosophers have used sleep to describe someone who is incapable of seeing the truth because they are caught up in particulars and in the Near East stories like Jacob’s Ladder and Joseph in Egypt put a strong emphasis on sleep as a state of mind.

To put it most simply, the King and Queen, having been gifted a child in their old age, have invited everyone to a celebration of her birth but did not invite all the horror of the world because rather than expose their daughter to the horror, for her protection, they keep her woefully unaware. She is so unaware that she falls in love at her first kiss and when the Prince leaves she is so naive she winds up with PTSD and hides in the world of unconsciousness. It is then that the Prince, who is busy what with having a dragon to fight and all, kisses Princess Aurora and breaks the curse, waking her up.

Now, there is a modern notion which comes from feminist philosophy that looks down on the idea of Princess Aurora needing a prince to wake her from her sleep. As an aside, let me give you guys a gift to help save you time. If you just do not have the time or inclination to really read and work at understanding the history of thought in the western world, but you want to be able to sound like a rational and intelligent person, you should begin with the feminist philosophers.

Feminist philosophy is unique in that it brings absolutely nothing of value to the table. It is the most facile, ignorant and absurdly ill-conceived  literature on any and every topic. Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Helene Cixous, Andrea Dworkin, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and the like have formed a nearly endless body of work exhaustively covering nearly every topic imaginable and have consistently been so shallow and uninformed that one is surprised these women are actually capable of coherent speech. While you will never find anything of positive value in philosophical feminism you can use it as an unerring guide on what not to think should you wish to sound even relatively intelligent.

The feminist take on the Prince awakening the Princess with a kiss manages to not only be ridiculous, but lacks any kind of insight into any field of intelligent study over the last six thousand years. So what is going on. Well, do you remember the story of Marduk? The war of the gods begins when Ea kills Apsu. Before that, Apsu, the eternal masculine and the avatar of culture, and Tiamat, the eternal female and the avatar of nature, are locked in an eternal embrace (there is some scholarship that suggests Adam and Eve were also in this situation before God split Eve out from Adam’s side — another story treated in a painfully ignorant way by feminist theorists). That eternal embrace, for Jung, is, in the individual, the balance which is the healthy psyche. To be plain, the Prince is merely the left hemisphere of the Princess’ brain.

Time and time again over the entire course of history we see this same theme play out where the eternal masculine lacks any creative potential on his own and the eternal feminine personifies this potential but has no ability to make order out of it and thus their embrace is what holds the world together. You can not have a mere organizing principle without the chaotic potential of life — that is the tyrannical Egypt of the Bible. Likewise, you cannot have the mere potential without the organizing principle, that is the Tiamat unleashed, Noah’s flood.

I will save you the run around, the prince — who is going off to fight the dragon (hint:  Tiamat) which is Maleficent, is the story of the adventurous part of the Princess deciding to voluntarily undertake the challenge of confronting that which is maleficent in this world despite the oedipal parents not wanting her to thus waking her up and

allowing her to integrate that into herself and become a fully developed person. It’s such a familiar story that it is everywhere. It is Bilbo and Frodo, it is Luke, it is Moses and Jesus, it is Marduk confronting Tiamat and it is Horus confronting Seth.

For Freud the story was about the Oedipal Complex and the subsequent repression, but Jung saw it on a deeper level. He doesn’t argue against the Oedipal Complex as a guiding universal archetype, his argument is that the deeper human story is not, as Freud had it, a story of succumbing to the oedipal failure, but rather the Hero’s story of overcoming it.

For the entire history of humankind man has been screaming this story into the world. Whether in the form of cave etchings from our ancient ancestors, to all of our religions (including the eastern religions…Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita or the Hindu story of the taming of Kali or the story of the Buddha), to our poetry, our music, our literature and our movies. For six thousand  years people have been writing down this one story and for tens of thousands of years before that they have been passing it down as an oral tradition. More than that, for three hundred million years before that they were acting it out in an embodied, unarticulated way. This is not a trifle. This is not an accident. This is the story of man as much as man is the teller of the story and that is why Jung felt it was the meta-narrative which guides our life.

The reason I wanted to mention this here at the closing of our week long discussion on the Enuma Elish is because it is important to see how this pattern overlays. It is the same story. The balance is disrupted. Nature in her dangerous and chaotic form seeks revenge. A new type of hero needs to emerge. That hero is not power and is not intelligence, but rather attention and articulation. It is always honest speech and careful attention that defeats the dragon of chaos and extracts out of her habitable order. And whether it is Prince Phillip awakening Princess Aurora defeating the curse of Maleficent or if it is Marduk defeating Tiamat or if it is Moses defeating the Pharaoh or if it is Luke defeating Vader it is and has always been the same story.

It is a story which cavemen scratched onto walls and which large movie studios dump hundreds of millions of dollars into for a feature film. It is the story from the first book, the Enuma Elish, and it will be the story from the last book one day. More than this, it is the story of our lives. Your life and my life. This is why I wanted to end our discussion on the Enuma Elish with this story. It is an important story to understand at the general level because it is the story of your life.

In his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961) Jung said that “Everyone lives in a story, so you might as well find out whose story you are living” and, further, he said “you should find out if the story you are living is a tragedy.” How do we find out. We pay attention. What do we do? We confront Maleficent in her negative dragon form. What weapons ought we use? Courage, attention and articulation. What is the prize? We create the world.

So, what do we do with this story that we are living? Well, the only place to look for the answer is in the story itself. And time and time again, since the first story was written, the answer has been the same. Pay attention and use courage, honest speech and articulation in order to confront the dragons that are waiting — and as the old texts make clear, they are waiting.