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Works like Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces have introduced readers to the significance of myth and archetype in our lives. Carol Pearson's bestselling The Hero Within takes us further by combining literature, anthropology, and psychology to clearly define, with insight and understanding, the six heroic archetypes that exist in all of us: the Innocent, the Orphan, the Wanderer, the Warrior, the Martyr, and the Magician. This substantially revised edition features new chapters that illuminate these archetypes, showing how to reach our fullest potential by achieving a balance between work, family, and the self.
"An excellent and useful book about the course our psychological and development can take.... {Pearson's} is an evolutionary archetypal psychology". -- Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., author of Goddess in Everywoman and Gods in Everyman
338 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
"Women, minority men, and the working class all have been culturally define as inferior and, as such, their role is to serve. To the degree that these groups have internalized such ideas, much of their giving and serving is linked unconsciously [...]" - p. 75Implicit biases has been debunked as a concept - I'm talking mainstream science here. But that aside, why is this textbook feminist dribble being injected into a book about archetypes at all?
"The contemporary woman leaves her parents, husband, or lover and takes off too. So prevalent is this expression of the Wanderer archetype that Erica Jong wrote in the 1960s, in How to Save Your Own Life, that 'Leaving one's husband is the only, the cosmic theme'" - p. 75
"What my friend did not see was that her client could not have a happy marriage because as yet she was incapable of taking her own journey while staying with him [...] no matter how wonderful her husband was, he was a captor to her." - p. 83In discussing the "securest people she knows" she writes
"In this list I would put several friends: a woman who knew in her soul she must be an artist and left a marriage to a wealthy man to pursue her art [...]"- p. 89When she uses men as an example, it's often negative:
"Men in this state infantilize women, so that women will not have the confidence to abandon them [...] they want to keep their wives, if not barefoot and pregnant, at least without the skills and confidence needed to have career" - p. 72I'm going to stop here because there's really no value in continuing. Those who are opposed to progressive ideologues have been given warning enough, and those who disagree with me have likely already psychologized my motive for writing this as some sort internalized oppression or other such nonsense.
Heroes have the esteem that comes from personal responsibility, but they have little or no sense of entitlement. To claim the hero within, we must let go of our belief that we are victimised if we do not have perfect parents or a perfect job, a perfect government or unending affluence. The very nature of heroism requires us to face the dragon, not sit around and complain that dragons exist and someone should do something about them. It never was, and it undoubtedly never will be, popular or easy to challenge "Holdfast the keeper of the past."