The Jungian Influence on Visual Media

Narratives
Heroic Archetypes and J. Campbell's Hero with a Thousand
Faces

Brian Duffy CDG1

This essay explores the fundamental limitations of Jungian Archetypes and Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’ as
tools to analyse and structure visual media. It is the contention of this essay that both the Jungian
Archetypes and The Hero’s Journey exist as a form of modern myth, ideological fictions presented and
widely accepted as fundamental cultural truths, despite their foundation of unreliable and subjective
research, leading to erroneous and frequently abhorrent conclusions. Both theories fail to account for
much of the potential of narratives and mythology by excluding those perspectives and ideas which do
not fit within Jung and Campbell’s preconceived notions.
Introduction
“All of the great mythologies and much of the mythic story-telling of the world are from the male point of
view.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

Anthropologist Bruce Lincoln identifies mythology as "ideology in narrative form" [1]. By this definition, the
narratives and settings that compose a myth carry inherent meaning and lessons, moulded from the
doctrines or beliefs of the author. In antiquity, mythology may have been democratised, shared through
countless villages and generations, becoming a tapestry defined by the broader cultures and eras in which
they were formed. This democratisation of narrative removes the overriding influence of a single author
and allows for a far more universally relevant story to be told. However, this understanding that
mythology transcends the individual, becoming immutable cultural monoliths teaching fundamental
truths, has left us vulnerable to certain modern myths which imitate the universality of traditional folklore,
but carry far more of their authors personal ideology. In 20th and 21st century culture, Carl Jung’s theory
of the archetypes, and Joseph Campbell’s The Heroes Journey are among the most prominent of these
modern myths. To be accepted as cultural truth in the way a traditional myth might be, a contemporary
ideology must exist as an extension upon some accepted cultural knowledge, typically pitched to their
audience as a distillation of antiquated systems or beliefs, crafted by conveniently stripping the subject of
nuance or contradictions until the myth can serve the authors ideology. In this way, unprecedented
political, economic, and cultural ideologies can be repackaged and presented as extensions of the natural
order.

Jungian Archetypes and The Heroes Journey are broadly presented as the leading tools to identify and
analyse mythology and storytelling, and as such it may seem strange to classify these theories as myths
themselves. However, the mythological nature of the archetypes should become clear upon some
reflection. Jung proposed that these narrative building blocks, which he believed we all possess and
employ to conceive of the world around us, exist transcendentally within the human psyche (or at least
those he considered fully human). By Jung’s own words, archetypes can be listed endlessly as “There are
as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life”.[2] This vague and faith-based assumption of
essential human nature, along with his theory of the ‘collective unconscious’ as a metaphysical state from
which the human psyche draws fundamental knowledge, would be rightfully considered a niche religious
belief system were it not for the age of agnostic science it emerged in. As for The Heroes Journey, which
may at first seem a more nuanced and practical approach to mythological analysis, author Joseph
Campbell again presents a vague and reductionist theory that purports to expose fundamental truths
about the human psyche based upon limited and highly subjective research.

In an interview given shortly before his death in 1987, Campbell describes a ritual carried out by a tribe in
New Guinea in which a child is taken from his home by adults wearing masks of their gods and beaten.
Eventually, the boy is given the opportunity to fight and strike down the representation of the god, after
which the mask is removed and placed upon the boy’s head, announcing that he has become an adult.
This exchange, Campbell states, is about “breaking past the image as fact, and understanding the image
as metaphor” [3]. Later he explains that becoming an adult is about shaking our dependency on mythology
to guide us, and taking ownership of the metaphor:

"How are we going to break out of that psychological bondage into self-responsible authority, courage
for what our thoughts are and our life? This is the problem of killing the infantile ego, which is one of
dependency, and coming into the mature ego of authority." [3]

While Campbell may be correct that the power of myth comes from ‘killing the gods’, destroying the image
of the myth, and embracing the metaphor, he does not seem to acknowledge that by homogenising
countless cultural and regional myths into a single narrative, he has not embraced the metaphors that
were present, rather he has stripped them of individual nuances and presented a supposed fact in their
place. Ironically, while calling for his audience to treat mythology as a metaphorical device, Campbell then
elevates these myths beyond their stated function as moral tales for children and instead remythologises
them as ethereal components of the Jungian unconscious. Thus, he removes the possibility of self-
responsible authority from both the storyteller and the audience, as they are at the mercy of the
inescapable Monomyth.

In a 2012 documentary The Perverts Guide to Ideology, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek describes our
relationship with ideology:

“We think that ideology is something blurring, confusing our straight view. Ideology should be glasses
which distort our view, and the critique of ideology should be the opposite, you take off the glasses so that
you can finally see the way things really are…This precisely is the ultimate illusion. Ideology is not simply
imposed on ourselves; ideology is our spontaneous relationship to our social world. How we perceive its
meaning, and we in a way enjoy our ideology. To step out of ideology, it hurts, it's a painful experience.
You must force yourself to do it.” [4]
According to leading theorist of ideology Professor Michael Freeden:

“Ideology is far more flexible and fluid than some people imagine. Although you may have a more
durable set of ideas at the centre of an ideology, the environment, the periphery of an ideology changes
all the time”. [5]

As such, it seems that by examining these ‘core’ beliefs that informed the development of Jung’s theory
of the archetypes before focusing on the ways in which those ideas were adapted by Joseph Campbell
and his own adherents, the ideologies present in each of these myths will hopefully become apparent. As
Žižek describes, this is a painful and difficult process, particularly for those who have adopted these myths
wholeheartedly. However, as Campbell himself explained, only by tearing down the myth as fact and
perceiving it instead as a vector for ideology can we achieve authority over the metaphor.

Carl Jung: A Racist

At the core of his theory of the mind, Carl Gustav Jung established the existence of a primal unconscious,
present in all human psyches. He believed this ‘collective unconscious’ has developed over millennia,
providing modern humans with fundamental tools for interpreting and understanding the world around
them, as well as the building blocks of personalities, known as the archetypes. By acknowledging these
archetypes within oneself, chiefly the Shadow, the Anima and the Animus, a personality and psyche would
emerge from this undifferentiated collective unconscious, through a process termed individuation.
However, Jung claimed this process was not inherent to humanity and was not present in early tribes of
humans, stating (without evidence):

“If we go right back to primitive psychology, we find absolutely no trace of the concept of the individual.
Instead of individuality we find only collective relationship.” [6]

As Dr. Farhad Dalal explored in his 1988 paper Jung: A Racist, Jung regularly and explicitly equates non-
Europeans with these prehistoric humans, attesting that unlike the civilized Europeans, people of Indian,
African, and Arabic descent whom he refers to as ‘primitives’ are incapable of true consciousness and are
more comparable to the white man’s unconscious mind. In Jung’s own words:

“Powell says ‘The confusion of confusions is that universal habit of savagery - the confusion of the
objective with the subjective’. Spencer and Gillan observe: ‘What a savage experiences during a dream is
just as real to him as what he sees when he is awake.’ What I myself have seen of the psychology of the
negro completely endorses these findings.” [6]

In this way, Jung excluded most if not all non-white groups from any potential of achieving so called
‘individuation’, relegating them instead to an infantile state he called ‘concretism’, in which no abstract
thought is possible, and all thoughts and feelings are related exclusively to physical sensation. However,
it is little surprise that Jung thought so little of the non-white mind, as he held a deep belief in the concept
of biological race and the righteousness of a rigid racial hierarchy. Upon inspection, the entire theory of
the archetypes and the broader field of Jungian analytical psychology appear to be based upon explicit
white supremacy and thoroughly debunked science:

“The child is born with a definite brain, and the brain of an English child will not work like that of the
Australian black fellow but in the way of the modern English person. The brain is born with a finished
structure, it will work in the modern way, but this brain has its history.” [7]

Speaking on his travels throughout East Africa and India, which were ostensibly to provide greater insight
into the non-European psychology, Jung makes clear how thoroughly he lacked any objectivity and self-
awareness throughout this period of research:

“I could not help feeling superior because I was reminded at every step of my European nature. That was
unavoidable: my being European gave me a certain perspective on these people who were so differently
constituted from myself. [8]

In Dalal’s paper, he describes how Jung’s feelings of cognitive superiority over non-white strangers
informed his theory of the archetypes, in particular the concept of the Shadow:

“Given the equality of the white unconscious with the black conscious, then according to Jung he has
another avenue into the black psyche: through his own unconscious… It is also certain that the black man
symbolised for Jung his primitive aspects, aspects that he was afraid of despite his claims to the contrary.
His error was in assuming that because the black symbolised the primitive to himself, therefore they
were primitive… Jung is confused by his own projection and cannot see past it. It is he who confuses
object and subject.”

“Europeans are allowed, by Jung, to project their shadow on to other Europeans and non-Europeans…
European projection is described thus: ‘everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our
neighbour’.” [9]
To many, the racism of Jung may at first seem standard to men of the time, particularly amongst the
European bourgeoisie, however upon closer inspection it becomes evident that these views were not
widely held, nor was his racism purely clinical, nor limited merely to African and Indian natives. During the
1930’s, Nazis took control of Germany and began burning the books of Jung’s former mentor Sigmund
Freud, later driving the Jewish Freud and family to flee Vienna to find refuge in London. At this same time,
Jung could be found praising the emergent and short-lived fields of ‘heritology and raceology’ that
underpinned the later Nazi eugenics project, as well as producing work claiming:

"The 'Aryan' unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish" [10]

Furthermore, he stated that:

"The Jew who is something of a nomad has never yet created a cultural form of his own and as far as we
can see never will, since all his instincts and talents require a more or less civilized nation to act as host
for their development." [10]

As Andrew Samuels describes in his 1994 paper entitled Jung and Antisemitism, the latter of these quotes
bears remarkable similarities to the Hitlerian theory of the Jew as a parasitic entity, and of Jewish culture
as inherently opposed and destructive to the healthy nation state. Samuels believes that “in C.G. Jung,
nationalism found its psychologist.” While Jung cannot be found speaking about Jews in quite the same
tone Hitler often did, it is worth nothing his clear Nazi sympathies prior to World War II, as well as his
presence on the commonly accepted ‘wrong side’ of history throughout many such historical movements.
As questions and struggles arose around racial segregation and apartheid, Jung made clear where he stood
on the issue, using ever more repugnant language to describe the non-white population:

“Racial infection is a most serious mental and moral problem where the primitive outnumbers the white
man. America has this problem only in a relative degree, because the whites far outnumber the coloured.
Apparently he can assimilate the primitive influence with little risk to himself. What would happen if
there was a considerable increase in the coloured population is another matter.” [10]

After many years of high-profile refutations and denunciations of Carl Jung’s views on race, perhaps the
last remaining surprise is the continued application of his theories and principles without proper
consideration of the flawed and frequently abhorrent premises they are based upon. While Dr. Dalal made
clear the thorough and extreme racism of Jung in 1988, and the issue was not properly acknowledged for
over three decades, until in 2019 a group of prominent Jungians wrote an open letter to the British Journal
of Psychotherapy, who originally published Dalal’s paper. This letter, entitled “Open Letter from a group
of Jungians on the question of Jung's writings on and theories about ‘Africans’” is surely a step in the right
direction, recognizing Jung’s “colonial and racist ideas” and discussing the many ways they have impacted
Jungian psychology throughout its history. However, acknowledgement is merely the first step in a
process of rehabilitation, and it remains unclear how easily Jung’s theories can be detached from the racist
beliefs that informed their conception.

Joseph Campbell & An Ignorance of History

As we have discussed, while researching his theory of the mind, Carl Jung travelled beyond Europe, to
experience self-assured superiority and later justify his preconceived opinions of the natives as unevolved
‘savages’. During this time, Jung was sure to give his thoughts on the history of India, the seat of myriad
empires, dynasties and sultanates spanning the length of recorded history, and home to Hinduism and
Zoroastrianism, the oldest worldwide contemporary religions.

“In all that flimsiness and vain tumult, one is conscious of immeasurable age with no history. After all
why should there be recorded history? In a country like India one does not really miss it. All her native
greatness is in any case anonymous and impersonal, like the greatness of Babylon or Egypt.” [10]

By clinging to his racist sense of superiority, Jung clearly blinded himself to the reality of India’s extensive
and well recorded history, even appearing unaware of the cultural history behind famous national
monuments such as the Taj Mahal, treating them as unknowable constructions of anonymous precursors,
if he knew of the existence at all. “History makes sense in European countries” Jung claims, as the
Europeans developed consciousness and increased awareness of the world around them, so did recorded
history grow alongside them. These are traits Jung firmly believed other races were lacking, supported
exclusively by his own wilful ignorance of non-European history, and therefore he simply declared that
recorded history did not exist beyond Europe.

“In The Hero with a Thousand Faces I have shown that myths and wonder tales…belong to a general type
which I have called ‘The Adventure of the Hero’, that has not changed in essential form through the
documented history of mankind.” [12]

Although Joseph Campbell was heavily influenced by the work of Carl Jung, there were some clear
distinctions in their ideas. In fact, while Jung deemed non-white ‘primitives’ incapable of intentionally
conceptualising their unconscious through archetypes and mythology, and much of Jung’s conclusions on
the nature of the ‘primitive’ psyche informed Campbell, he instead believed this process of storytelling
was entirely universal across all cultures. However, it was another shared trait which draws the clearest
parallel between Jung and Campbell: an extensive and wilful ignorance of inconvenient historical fact.

“All of the great mythologies and much of the mythic story-telling of the world are from the male point
of view.” [13]

By his own admission, the universal mythology Campbell proposes is based upon an imbalance in
perspective, one which disadvantages an entire half of the world population and rejects inconvenient
historical counter evidence, much like Jung before him. As B.J. Priester wrote when outlining a potential
feminine alternative to Campbell’s Monomyth:

“In large part because of the historical focus of Campbell’s analysis, his model for the Hero’s Journey
describes a character arc that is built for male heroes, emphasizing what are familiar and traditional male
choices and male values.” [14]

While Campbell may be correct in identifying an overrepresentation of male heroes in both historic and
contemporary storytelling, he does not seem to analyse this observation, nor value any exceptions.
Instead, he interpreted the disparity as an inherent feature of storytelling and reduced women to the role
of objects of desire or temptation in his eventual theory of the Monomyth. This presumption founded in
Campbell’s subjective experiences blinded him to historical evidence of influential female myths.

“A developed religion with all beliefs, rules and conventional rites appeared for the first time on thirty
thousand years ago, as attested by repeated finds of the mother goddess figurines and by the art in
sanctuary caves.” [15]
As Emmanuel Anati states, the oldest recorded religion and presumably the most prevalent myths of the
time centred on a feminine deity, while ancient history contains countless examples of goddesses and
female protagonists in mythology all around the world. More than simply appearing in supporting roles
or as objects of desire for the male protagonists that Campbell emphasises, these female mythological
characters were regularly the heroes of their stories or held positions of great power within their
pantheon. In ancient Greece, myths of the goddesses Artemis and Athena positioned women as fearless
hunters and warriors, while tales of Áine, Brigid, and the Morrigan in Celtic folklore, as well as Hel and
Freya in Norse mythology represent many forms of femininity and thoroughly refute this idea that
mythology historically centred exclusively men, even within the European mythology in which Campbell
was well versed.

Beyond simply appearing as goddess images, examples of female-led narratives abound throughout world
history, such as Manimekalai and Kundalakesi, two of the Five Great Epics of Tamil Buddhist literature,
the Greek epic play Antigone by Sophocles, or the female protagonist and narrator Scheherazade featured
in One Thousand and One Nights, a world-renowned collection of Eastern folk tales, among many more.
In Europe, for centuries many of the most popular folklore and fairy tales told the stories of princesses,
witches and young girls, while a significant number of Victorian-era literature classics such as Jane Eyre,
Wuthering Heights and Tess of the d’Urbervilles feature women as protagonists and narrators. Even the
year before Campbell published his seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the top-grossing film
was The Red Shoes (1948), featuring ballet dancer Victoria Page as the protagonist, based upon the
eponymous Hans Christian Anderson story. Joseph Campbell’s bias here is clear, as he interprets the
prevalence of traditional male hero narratives and their identifiable similarities as the ultimate narrative
archetype, without consideration for the significant presence and popularity of contradictory examples
both from antiquity and from his own time.

Later interpretations of the monomyth by adherents such as David Adams Leeming and Christopher
Vogler have attempted to reconstruct the concept for a modern audience by removing stages such as the
‘Meeting with the Goddess’, a metaphor which represents the hero attaining some prize or boon on their
way to meet their goal. Also removed was the ‘Woman as Temptress’ in which we are assured the woman
merely represents the lure of the hero’s base impulses. However, just as the racism of Jung informed the
very basis of his theorising on the human psyche, so too did The Heroes Journey emerge from the sexism
of Joseph Campbell reducing women to objects, rather than subjects of narrative. By ignoring the
significant (albeit outnumbered) presence of female perspectives in media and mythology Campbell
continued the legacy of exclusion that led to his own sample bias. Mythologists Anne Baring and Jules
Cashford explored this legacy in The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, a study of the loss of
goddess myths in favour of patriarchal Judeo-Christian iconography. As they explain, this gender
imbalance impacts the meaning of our mythology:

“In Judeo-Christian mythology there is now, formally, no feminine dimension of the divine, since our
particular culture is structured in the image of a masculine god who is beyond creation, ordering it from
without; he is not within creation, as were the mother goddesses before him. This results, inevitably, in
an imbalance of the masculine and feminine principle, which has fundamental implications for how we
create our world and live in it.”

“With the restoration of the feminine to a complementary relation with the masculine, might there then
be the possibility of a new mythology of the universe as one harmonious living whole?” [16]
Feminist critique of The Hero with a Thousand Faces is widespread, with many attempts to adapt or
compliment the monomyth with a journey more suited to the archetypical female, such as screenwriter
Kim Hudson’s The Virgin’s Promise. Hudson outlines a narrative framework in which the protagonist
begins with clear desires and must break free from oppression to embrace her inner power, transforming
society in the process. While this structure can be mapped on to popular examples such as Cinderella and
Frozen, it remains that despite attempts to repair the monomyth with expansions to include clear and
notable exceptions, the core thesis of a single unchanging narrative is undermined by the mere act of
highlighting those exceptions. Furthermore, these attempts to rehabilitate Campbell’s theories directly
conflict with his explicit opinions on the role of women in storytelling. In a 1982 interview published in
Campbell’s own memoir, shamelessly titled The Hero’s Journey, Campbell made clear his disdain for
women’s attempts to insert themselves into his envisioned hero narrative:

“Rozanne Zucchet: Do you feel that women need to begin to feel better about themselves again or that
society needs to change and reevaluate some of its values?

Campbell: No. All they have to do is stop looking at the boys and wondering whether they are in
competition with them. Just realize what effect they are having on the boys. It came to me at Sarah
Lawrence (College). I was teaching these courses on mythology and at the end of my last year there this
woman comes in and sits down and says, “Well, Mr. Campbell, you’ve been talking about the hero. But
what about the woman?”

I said, “The woman’s the mother of the hero, she’s the goal of the hero’s achieving, she’s the protectress
of the hero, she is this, she is that. What more do you want?”

She said, “I want to be the hero!”

So I was glad that I was retiring that year and not going to teach any more [laughter].” [17]

The Monomyth in Academia

Having explored the flawed beliefs and evidence that formed the theories of archetypes and the
monomyth, it is clear that these supposedly universal concepts were in fact never intended to include vast
groups of people who did not fit within Jung and Campbell’s highly subjective frameworks. Furthermore,
Joseph Campbell’s monomyth framework has fallen out of favour within a range of academic fields, mostly
for his overly generalised approach to comparative mythology. Campbell’s work has been the subject of
criticism from religious scholars such as Lesley Northup, and Robert Ellwood who stated:

“(A) tendency to think in generic terms of peoples, races, religions, or parties, which as we shall see is
undoubtedly the profoundest flaw in mythological thinking.” [18]

Similarly, prominent folklorists such as Barre Toelken and Donald Consentino have spoken out against The
Hero with a Thousand Faces, specifically Campbell’s selection bias and over-generalisation, writing:

“Campbell could construct a monomyth of the hero only by citing those stories that fit his preconceived
mold, and leaving out equally valid stories … which did not fit the pattern” [19]

“It is just as important to stress differences as similarities, to avoid creating a (Joseph) Campbell soup of
myths that loses all local flavor.” [20]
In his essay Folkloristics in the Twenty-First Century, published in The Journal of American Folklore,
folklorist Alan Dundes thoroughly disparaged Joseph Campbell and the effect he has had on the field of
study. Dundes refers to Campbell and his followers as ‘amateurs’ and expresses specific frustration at self-
declared folklorists teaching Jungian archetypes and the Monomyth as folkloristics without a true
understanding of the topic. Dundes protests: “Can one possibly imagine anyone claiming to be a physicist
or mathematician without ever having had formal training in physics or mathematics?” [21] Dundes spends
the bulk of the essay rebuking Campbell himself, his theory of the monomyth, and later the Jungian
archetypes which inspired it:

“Campbell does not really know what a myth is, and he does not really distinguish it from folktale and
legend … It has long been a popular fantasy among amateur students of myth that all peoples share the
same stories. This clearly an example of wishful thinking. Campbell referred to the hero pattern as a
universal monomyth … On the universality issue, the empirical facts suggest otherwise.”

“Despite the lack of evidence, Campbell appears to have no doubt about the existence of folklore
universals. In this respect, he is a throwback to nineteenth-century theories of psychic unity.”

“Still, it is Campbell’s insistence on the existence of archetypes that I find most disturbing … I believe
there is no single idea promulgated by amateurs that has done more harm to serious folklore study than
the notion of archetype.” [21]

Criticism of the monomyth has not been limited to scholars of the arts and humanities, as sociologists find
his research and categorisation meaningless and vague. As anthropologist Muriel Crespi wrote:

“It (the monomyth) is unsatisfying from a social science perspective. Campbell's ethnocentrism will raise
objections, and his analytic level is so abstract and devoid of ethnographic context that myth loses the
very meanings supposed to be embedded in the 'hero'.” [22]

Vogler, Lucas and the Legacy of Campbell

Despite this increasing opposition in academic circles, broad feminist disapproval of The Heroes Journey
and prominent reproach of Jung’s racism, both the archetypes and the monomyth remain highly
influential on contemporary media. In a famous and impactful memo, A Practical Guide to Joseph
Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, written in 1985 by Hollywood producer Christopher Vogler,
then a story consultant at Walt Disney Studios, Vogler states:

“In the long run, one of the most influential books of the 20th century may turn out to be Joseph
Campbell’s THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES … The ideas in the book are an excellent set of
analytical tools. With them you can always determine what’s wrong with a story that’s floundering, and
you can find a better solution to almost any story problem by examining the pattern laid out in the
book.” [23]

Noticeably, later versions of this memo insert the following line into the previous passage:

“With them you can compose a story to meet any situation, a story that will be dramatic, entertaining,
and psychologically true.” [24]

This amendment indicates an important shift in perspective; Vogler no longer views the monomyth as an
analytical framework. Instead, he presents the theory as the ultimate narrative template. The Hero’s
Journey is no longer a supposedly revelatory insight into the history of storytelling, nor does it refer
exclusively to myths of antiquity. having instead become a model upon which Vogler believes all manner
of narratives can and should be constructed:

“The myth is easily translated to contemporary dramas, comedies, romances, or action-adventures by

substituting modern equivalents for the symbolic figures and props of the hero story.” [23]

Vogler goes on to present a summary of Campbell’s stages of the Hero’s Journey, and insists that “the
hero myth is universal, occurring in every culture, in every time”. However, as with many other
interpretations, Vogler attempts to reconcile Campbell’s limited scope for representation by claiming:

“Changing the sex and ages of the basic characters only makes it more interesting and allows for ever
more complex webs of understanding to be spun among them. … The myth is infinitely flexible, capable
of endless variation without sacrificing any of its magic, and it will outlive us all.” [23]

This memo, which inspired Christopher Vogler’s later book The Writer’s Journey and brought a lot of
Campbell’s ideas into the mainstream of Western media, was written only two years after Campbell’s
interview in which he stated there was no room for heroines in the monomyth structure. Just as Jung and
Campbell demonstrated in the creation of their theories, it appears their devotees must engage in wilful
ignorance of the inherent contradictions of their belief.

Aside from the inherent rejection of intersectional and inclusive storytelling, and the widespread
academic disapproval of Jung and Campbell’s research and conclusions, there remains another sever flaw
of both the monomyth and the archetypes: the creative limitations and misguided priorities they impose
on visual media. By far the most notorious application of the monomyth as a story template is in George
Lucas’ script for Star Wars (retroactively titled Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope). Lucas famously claims
that while writing the third draft of his script, he became heavily influenced by the comparative mythology
such as Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and began to model the narrative around the
monomyth. However, this is thoroughly disputed by Michael Kaminski, author of The Secret History of Star
Wars, who wrote:

“Campbell’s influence on the saga, however, has become quite exaggerated over the years, even by
Lucas himself; to be sure, Campbell’s work had a personal impact on Lucas, but the level of influence
beyond that is questionable.”

“As Lucas also admits, he didn’t even meet Campbell of hear one of his lectures until after the original
trilogy was finished, despite being called Campbell’s ‘greatest student’.”

“After meeting, the two used each other’s status and exaggerated connection to sell themselves: for
Lucas, it gave him proper scholastic backing for his “mythic” B-movie, and for Campbell, it finally gave
him worldwide recognition due to the association with George Lucas. Luke Skywalker posed alongside
Greek gods on a new edition of Hero with A Thousand Faces” [25]

Kaminski goes on to explain that earlier drafts of the script seem to adhere more closely to the monomyth than
the version that supposedly followed the revelation. He also points out that according to the supposed
universality of Campbell’s theory, its coincidental overlap with Lucas’ adventure tale should be expected
regardless of intention, and “the world isn’t praising the ‘genius’” of other directors who “fall into this pattern”.
Despite Kaminski himself appearing to have faith in the monomyth, he has highlighted here the most significant
flaw in using the Hero’s Journey as a creative tool. Campbell’s core observation centres on the idea of a
fundamental narrative structure, which all great myths and fiction instinctively follow. If this is true, then the
template’s function is immediately invalidated, as any story produced in its absence would surely follow most
of the outline regardless.

Now, as Christopher Vogler wrote in his original memo, the model could be used to “determine what’s wrong
with a story” and “find a better solution to almost any story problem by examining the pattern laid out in the
book.” However, this approach seeks to homogenise storytelling, implying the best narratives are those that
are most similar to the rigid monomyth, and that problems faced when creating a story exist purely as a result
of straying from the one true path. The potentially stifling effect his has on creativity should be self-evident,
though a prime example was presented when George Lucas returned to the Star Wars saga at the turn of the
millennium to direct a series of prequels to his original trilogy. Despite many years of friendship and mentorship
from Joseph Campbell, Lucas failed to recapture the magic of his first trilogy, and the resulting films received
mixed reviews, a far cry from the heralding the originals received. The first entry, The Phantom Menace was
criticised as having “wooden and melodramatic dialogue” and being “burdened by exposition and populated
with stock characters”, while the entire prequel trilogy became cultural shorthand for audience
disappointment, style over substance and squandered potential in media. Even famed critic Roger Ebert’s
comparatively glowing review contends that:

“The importance of the (Star Wars) movies comes from their energy, their sense of fun, their colorful
inventions and their state-of-the-art special effects. I do not attend with the hope of gaining insights into
human behavior.” [26]

This seems to directly conflict with Jungian foundation upon which Campbell and Lucas in turn built their works,
as the archetypes which comprise the ‘stock characters’ described in the films are supposedly manifestations
of the human psyche itself. Evidently, no amount of exposure to Campbell’s theories fixed the issues with the
story of Anakin Skywalker, despite Vogler’s assurances that the monomyth can resolve “almost any story
problem”.

Conclusion
Both Carl Jung’s archetypes and Joseph Campbell’s monomyth are rooted in injustice, explicitly excluding
those who do not conform with Campbell’s ‘hero’ archetype, or Jung’s racist model of individuation. Over
years of rewriting, adaptation, and interpretation, many of the most objectionable aspects of these ideas
and their creators have become obscured or gone entirely unspoken until recently. Aesthetically, this has
created a far more amenable version of the theories, one which allows Jungian psychoanalysts to offer
treatment to non-white patients, or for J.J. Abrams to retell the Star Wars myth with a female protagonist.
Regardless of this supposed, it remains true that the Jungian archetypes such as the Shadow still carry the
racism of Jung in their very definitions, while Campbell’s monomyth was founded on an explicit and
adamant refusal to accept the heroine as interchangeable or even relevant.

If attempting to follow a particular template or apply a certain analytical framework requires amending
and rehabilitating the core concepts beyond recognition, and removing most traces of the original
theorist, then we must question the value of clinging to an obsolete set of tools, rather than building a
new framework of narrative understanding more in line with contemporary values. Furthermore, it is this
very act of rehabilitation that mythologises outdated ideas such as the monomyth and Jungian archetypes.
Adapting and smoothing the rough edges of these theories obscures the core ideology and cloaks the
resulting subjective interpretations as undisputed cultural knowledge. In the recent reincarnation of
Lucas’ Star Wars saga, Kylo Ren calls upon the protagonist to abandon the inflexible duality of the Jedi
and Sith, saying: “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.” Similarly, by abandoning these rigid narrative
ideologies that have been enshrined by nearly 70 years of high-profile devotion and proclamation,
perhaps a far more equitable system will arise, one that embraces and values the intersectional
discrepancies that define our individual stories.

“It's the questions we can't answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man
an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he'll look for his own answers.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

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