I decided to finally knuckle-down and read this after having some disparaging remarks to make about the whole project that Campbell made. Too much of the criticism against Campbell’s theories seem to be personal attacks meant to insult him and not an actual critique of his arguments for the Monomyth. I realized the only way I would be able to really give this man a fair shot would be to read his book. Unfortunately, I now think that it was wasted effort, because Campbell’s arguments were of the quality that I anticipated them to be and arguably, they were worse than I expected in some respects. The major problem with this book is that everything about the Hero’s Journey is premised upon Sigmund Freud’s debunked arguments about the Oedipus Complex. The Oedipus Complex is actually the central component of this entire thesis for his arguments. The rest of the arguments don’t really have as much coherence and seem to argue self-contradictory points that feel more like he’s arguing for stories to be morally relative on an intrinsic level. I was surprised that he didn’t argue for good and evil, but his attempts to make every single human mythology is based on the same inherent “truth” as a value system throughout all of humankind seems like a bizarre attempt at moral relativism that seems unfounded to me.

The first two chapters did not impress me and seems to indicate that his views are indeed just a product of their time. He cites Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung as the basis for the beginning of the adventure. While they were likely very good resources for his time; Jung has been tossed out of credible psychology research due to lack of any clinical trials for his theories and Freud has been found to reduce too much of human psychology to an overemphasis on sexual beliefs. Campbell’s arguments for this portion aren’t very good, because he cherry-picks examples of people’s dreams that fit into his beliefs about Freud and Jung, and uses that as the starting point of a supposed universal truism behind mythic stories. Dreams don’t actually reflect a deeper reality or dark truth about ourselves; modern scientific research suggests it’s just a method for the mind to clean itself to better make way for new memories as a process of forgetting about old ones. Trying to interpret dreams in any real-world sense is a useless effort and based upon false assumptions that there must be some deep, profound message within our psyche about why we had a particular experience, when modern scientific evidence doesn’t support such assumptions anymore. Most strikingly, he admits to all the forms of disappointment and failure in the human experience as we grow older or learn of horrors in the world via our own experience or through the news, but he only seems to argue in favor of a sort Buddhistic and Stoic internal change as the only possible solution; it’s an argument for self-delusion without any belief that external change and systems that abuse us are possible to change through forms of art and communication. He seems to believe the only solution is escapism. He sets-up the arguments and breaks them down well; but his solution seems unhelpful to me because it is focused too much on internal change instead of tackling external, abusive systems that hurt people. This is honestly everything I expected it to be insofar as his conclusions on this aspect. The cultural osmosis doesn’t seem to have distorted this delusional view that he presented in the second chapter. In fact, the overemphasis on garbage comedy like self-referential humor seems to be an overgrowth of his banal arguments in chapter two about how comedy and internal perspective shift at a depressing world are the only solutions to tackling lifelong systems of abuse. Thus, the Joss Whedon and other type of what’s incorrectly been called “Millennial” humor is a natural overgrowth of his arguments and not a contradiction to them. It seems when the Monomyth has exhausted its usage, it can only continue as dull and pretentious attempts at humor.

Chapter three seems to use the example of Moses and cites Mohammed as an example of a typical Monomyth Hero. This is incredibly difficult for me to take seriously. The premise is already based on antiquated information compared to modern psychological research, but then he uses examples of stories of two prominent slave-owning rapists of Moses and Mohammed as so-called heroes, and I have to ask . . . what would disproving this concept even look like, if every value system is considered equally universal and true? This seems like some bizarrely extreme moral relativism for the sake of making a bold claim about unifying format for all mythological stories that doesn’t seem credible at all and I’m only up to chapter three. He repeatedly cites Islam as an argument; he seems to deliberately ignore the massacres of Jewish villages. slave-ownership, and the raping of female captives. I’m really trying to give it the benefit of the doubt, but as I read further, it just seems to worsen and devolve into nonsense. Chapter four is a constant self-contradiction of terms taking every single starting point of multifarious mythologies as an origin for an adventure and every value – even trickery and guile – as a moral equivalent to sincerity and compassion to the point that he repeatedly praises people like the Islamic Prophet Mohammed as being part of the universal Hero’s Journey. How on earth is this argument coherent at all? If you can’t demarcate what something is from what it is not, then how can you know that it is correct or incorrect? How can it be demonstrated when the monomyth is correctly or incorrectly utilized? If everything fits the monomyth, then why can’t anyone just make-up another formula, claim that every story on earth fits that formula, and manipulate the evidence with a scant few examples to generalize everything into a single format? That’s basically what the first four chapters are. After this, he makes a second “Chapter 1” for his newly established “Part I” in a very confusing manner. The new Chapter 1 of Part 1 called “The Calling” seems to just use contradictory story beginnings that have nothing to do with each other as an argument that it’s all the same, when he doesn’t prove that premise. This honestly reads more like he just gobbled a bunch of stories together, then claimed that they all had the same essential beginning, and then confused the premise that he failed to make the case for as the conclusion. His argument for this portion doesn’t really make sense either; why does an external event have to change a person’s view of things? Why can’t the person come to their own conclusions based upon where they live? Why can’t they just desire to leave the origin point of the story naturally out of curiosity? This seriously reads as if he just mashed a bunch of contradictory ideas, claimed they were all the same thing, and then failed to prove any of it because he didn’t even make the case for it.

Here are a few snippets that made me decide to just give-up on this, because the arguments were so bad in my opinion. If you don’t think I’m being fair, all I can honestly say is that I tried to give it as fair a chance as possible and I just can’t take the arguments that he presented seriously. I’m sorry if that seems unfair, but I really tried to be impartial and I feel like my negative views were validated from the first five chapters already:

Pages 3 and 4 of the first Chapter 1:

The background for this portion is the story of a princess who loses a ball in a river and a talking frog gets it for her on the condition that he can be her friendly companion, she agrees. He retrieves the ball and she leaves without him. Someone please explain what on earth he’s even trying to say in this portion as I do not comprehend at all.

From pages 47 – 48:

I’m afraid that I can’t take any of it seriously and I really tried to. I pushed myself to read five full chapters trying to continue to give it a chance and I’m just not convinced by either the premise or his examples. I can only give this a tentative 0 / 10 in good conscience. I might try to finish it later, but for now . . . I just don’t see the point.