Who is Joseph Campbell?
Joseph Campbell, writer, educator, lecturer, teacher and by some considered almost shamanic, did not become known to the popular world until after his death in 1987. In 1988, PBS aired a 6 hour conversation between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, which discussed at length Campbell’s theory that most myths, stories, and religions share the same types of images and archetypes that represent the hero’s journey, which is the desire of the everyman to achieve individuation or wholeness of the psyche. This concept of shared images in vastly different cultures was Campbell’s distillation of Carl Jung’s work on the universal unconscious. To Jung, all people had, beneath a personal unconscious, a set of shared images that meant roughly the same thing. Myth, religion, folklore and fairy tales were artistic representations of the universal unconscious. Joseph Campbell called this underlying structure the monomyth. For Joseph Campbell, this connection to a universal unconscious
