Customer Reviews

The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By

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3 star:		(1)
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This is one of my all-time favorite books, and one of my favorite books to recommend to people. Pearson explains the Hero and the Heroic Archetypes (Warrior, Wanderer, etc.) in a clear and down-to-earth way. This is the easiest, most straightfoward, introduction I have found to Jungian and archetypal psychology. It presents powerful life-altering ideas in a readily accessible format. This book is an excellent introduction to Jungian thought. It is excellent for anyone who feels "stuck" in life. It is wonderful for people who want to understand themselves and others more deeply, especially with regard to developing higher possibilities. It is a book which helps you discover, and encourages you to pursue, what is most admirable within you.

This book really helped me to embrace the different stages in life and showed me how to grow into who I want to be. It not only restored my faith in "This to shall pass", but showed me how and why. It helped me to accept the lessons I needed to know then and now. It is a book I give to friends when they hit the wall. There is nothing better I can do for them.

From the perspective of an educator who deals with students who range from young adult to fify somethings in a community college setting I found this an invaluable resource. I feel the work is of immese value as it always requires that you evaluate your current perspective and superimpose it upon those your are dealing with. If one can read through this text without repositioning their own parameters it would amazing.

It would be of particular value for anyone trying to determine their place in the overall scheme of things. The sixties manta, "the family of man on the spaceship earth," could aptly be used to subtitle this work.

I had to read this book for a class, otherwise I likely would never had chosen it. I was extremely pleased with its content, and found that I had experienced all of the archetypal stages in my life in some form or another. My fellow classmates were equally pleased. As a matter of fact, one student in particular went so far as to tatoo the Chinese symbol for the Warrior on his bicep.

I am a professional astrologer and I use this material with my clients all the time. It is always met with keen interest and is usually an instantly vitalizing experience. Just the knowledge that there are other ways to engage with life is sometimes all it takes to get people fired up! As Bob Dylan once said: "He who is not busy being born is busy dying."

The re-birth that people experience via this material is testament to its archetypal nature. Astrology has 4 elements which match the 4 heroic paths (the innocent and orphan are really pre-heroic). Fire=Warrior, Air=Wanderer, Water=Martyr & Earth=Magician. Your astrology chart can help tell you how to access each of these archetypes and re-vivify your life by busying yourself being born into each of them.

Pearson offers the best example of how to apply the hero myth in our lives. Like all Modern theorist she gives excellent examples of the structure and fuction of the hero myth and how to apply it to improve relationships in your life. Most people will find themselves a better person having read this book.

You do not have to be an expert on the hero myth to gain key insights from this book. Segal's book, In Quest of the Hero, is an excellent place to start if you want to understand the hero myth from a Classical perspective.

In fact, educators and therapists should have both this book, Segal's book, Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces: Commemorative Edition (Bollingen Series (General)) and my book, The Hero Myth Revisited

Also, Pearson has a great companion book,Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World If you enjoyed her "Hero Within" book, get the companion book.

An easy way to understand archetypes and how they play out in your life.
Tom Youngholm , author of The Celesital Bar and In the Shadow of the Sphere

I thought this would be all about Archetypes and it was mostly a self- help book. Yes, I am dumb.

This book, at first glance, appears to be an open-ended discussion about human development. The theory upon which it is based is so poetically woven together that it goes down much more easily than it has any theoretical right to do. Given its strong and convincing introduction, one can easily imagine it to be a cut above others fashioned from the same Jungian mold, but which have since been disparagingly referred to as "pop psychology." And here I refer specifically to Helen Palmer's "Enneagram" and Otto Kroeger's "Myers-Briggs Type Indicator" among a handful of others. As is the present one, they all used psychological typologies based loosely on Jungian theory of universal archetypes. The question is: is this one any different or better than the others?


I took great pains to read this book carefully as readers may note that I have also reviewed books on heroism by Otto Rank, Joseph Campbell and Bruno Bettelhiem (and have read, but have not yet reviewed, books on this topic by Rene Dubois, Thomas Bulfinch, Robert Bly, Dixon Wecter, and Joseph R. Novello, who was once my tennis partner at the Regency health club in McLean, Va. where we discussed these very issues at length.) The point being that all discussions of cultural heroism, must be taken seriously, for they go to the core of what the national drama is all about:

To wit, cultures are nothing if not sanctioned stories and narratives about their own self-constructed, self-reported and self-validated heroes and the respective images and exploits of those heroes. The abiding fear of course with any psychological theory is that it will simply reduce to an alternative way of explaining, reifying and reinforcing (but shedding no light on) existing cultural norms, ideas and rules, which more often than not (even in so-called "free societies") are at the very least disrespectful of individual freedoms, pursuit of self-awareness and self-development, if often not down right oppressive towards them. As a result one has to be careful when spinning theories about heroic archetypes. I do not believe this author has been careful at doing so.


Although I believe this author's theory has merit, her justification for why it is a "conscious theory" rather than "just another theory dealing with the unconscious" was unconvincing to the point of raising red flags. Her claim is that our culture is so enlightened that there is no need to continue plumbing the unconscious as a modality of self-discovery? (Really, now?) That is indeed a curious stance even if it were true, and I don't for a moment believe that it is true in the least. And although this is far from a minor theoretical side issue, I nevertheless gave the author a pass on it, the benefit of the doubt and her just due:


And here she gives us six archetypes, or models of heroism gleaned from Jungian developmental psychology. These are put forth as new more enlightened ways of seeing and entering the world, which we might adopt for our own journey towards self-discovery and self-development. Each is represented and delineated along the lines of the metaphor of a journey along life's path in which an individual is seen to go through various phases and stages as he matures and develops.


It begins with the complete trust of the INNOCENT, moves on to the longing for safety of the ORPHAN, the self-sacrifice of the MARTYR, the exploring of the WANDERER, the competition and triumph of the WARRIOR, and then ends with the authenticity and wholeness of the MAGICIAN. These archetypes are seen as paradigmatic guides to help us understand why we choose the world we live in. Implicit in this paradigm and journey is that the individual is mature enough to take full responsibility for his own existence (and lives in a society where he is allowed to do so), arguably both questionable assumptions at best, at least up to all but the very last stage of development.


The goal of course is to follow this progression through each stage until sufficient self-mastery (through increased self-discovery and self-awareness) is achieved. Each stage thus must be completed before the next one is attempted. And only the successful completion of one stage makes possible movement on to the next. And although the progression is not necessarily linear, the results are always cumulative. And although people of different races and genders and cultural experiences are likely to experience the stages in different orders with different impacts, whatever may be their backgrounds, embedded in each stage is a developmental task that must be mastered: In short, one does not get to be a hero without paying the price of ascending the ladder of self-discovery, self-awareness and self-development. As you grow and change you get to add themes that will further deepen your awareness and make your life richer and fuller. Each individual has, and may bring, his own truths to his journey, and thus may shape and define his own image of heroism (and presumably also change the society?).


But the external world, in this author's formulation is a "neutral" black-box. It is seen as passively reflecting and reinforcing our beliefs about it and about ourselves. [It seems to me that in order to have a viable theory with any real psychological import, we need to know a great deal more about the passive black-box called culture and society? How can the two (our hero and society) be so casually and arbitrarily disconnected? And how can society not be seen as the primary actor that it is?]


When the world (meaning our culture) does not reflect our desires and aims, we can see only as far as the existing cultural scripts allow us. According to the author, it is at this point that the developmental awareness of the hero kicks in. It is the hero within us that provides the motive force to break out of the stereotypical role, "place" or "strait-jacket of conformity" that society has prepared for us to assume. It is only our heroism that proves that society's control over our being is not total -- that is, unless we lack the courage to resist its control and as a result allow it to be maintained. It is thus one thing to muster the courage to take full responsibility for our lives and quite another to submit to being "socially adjusted" into a conformist role reserved for us for the rest of our lives. T.S. Eliot has framed our hero's dilemma perfectly in a poem called the "The Confidential Clerk," in which one character says to another: "If you lack the courage to impose your terms on life, then you must accept the terms it offers you."


Yet, according to this author's formulation, both the subconscious and the society in which we operate (our world) are treated as if they are twin black-boxes. [Why?] This is especially debilitating today, as we are learning that much of Freud's map of the subconscious conforms to what the physical scientists are finding out about the mind. And especially when individuals, even in "so called free societies" are discovering that individual awareness, vigilance and action are needed on a constant basis just to function as normal every citizens -- not to mention as societal heroes. The author's heroic level of awareness today is a minimum requirement just to keep our freedoms intact. Self-awareness and self-discovery in so-called "free societies" are no longer to be taken for granted as perhaps they were in 1989 when this book went to print. They are no longer just discretionary activities reserved only for cultural heroes, but are an imperative of our everyday existence for every freedom-loving citizen: an imperative against, plutocrats, terrorists, lobbyists, militarists, racists, neo-Fascists, anti-Semites, anarchists, and other anti-democratic forces. Otherwise, with or without heroes, we end up with the likes of GW Bush and Sarah Palin, the "Tea Party," Wall Street Casino Capitalists, the Vampire Lobbyists, etc. calling the shots and writing the scripts for the cultural drama and defining who and what our heroes are.


The truth is exactly as the author notes that many of our socialization patterns are based on limiting stereotypes. She argues that stereotypes assigned to us by society are "domesticated and safe versions of her archetypes" and that by bringing the archetypes out into the open we discover the real source of their power. According to her, it is the archetype behind the stereotypes that is full of life and power and that the real power to the individual is his being able to bring the archetypes behind the stereotype out into the light of day, making the meanings that govern our lives explicit. When we fail to name them we remain hostages to them and can do nothing else but live out their plots. [Boy, what's in a name?]


According to this formulation, society itself is just a backboard against which we bounce our heads like basketballs. As far as anyone can tell this backboard can either be brittle, malleable, or it can be impenetrable, no one really knows? It remains a passive actor in this formulation. Yet it is the most important hidden variable in the theory. [Speaking of bringing things out in the open?]

According to this theory, the hero never knows what he is up against. Yet society is not nearly as inscrutable as this. It plays a dominant role in defining, not just the roles of stereotypes for the individuals, but also in writing the scripts for the entire societal drama. [Look at the horrible movie Avatar for instance, so far the highest grossing film ever?] To ignore the role that culture plays in writing the script is to render the role of hero to that of an unwitting functionary of the state.

As we have seen, heroes too can be defined as the "unwanted" of society. And the ones who step out of line like JFK, RFK, Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, did are summarily shot, even in our so called "free society." It is true that they are all martyrs and thus posthumously made heroes of our free society. But is that really the kind of hero the theory had in mind?


Three stars

Excellent book quality - like brand new and was delivered speedily. Saved money and was very satisfied!