The Classic, Banished, and Negative Hero
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Jung Journal Culture & Psyche ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ujun20 The Classic, Banished, and Negative Hero Isabelle Meier To cite this article: Isabelle Meier (2021) The Classic, Banished, and Negative Hero, Jung Journal, 15:1, 36-48, DOI: 10.1080/19342039.2021.1862593 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/19342039.2021.1862593 Published online: 17 Feb 2021. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ujun20 Franz Stassen (1869–1949) illustration for Der Ring des Nibelungen (Siegfried) (The Ring of the Nibelung: Part 3: Siegfried) by Richard Wagner (1813–1883). Siegfried stabs the giant Fafner who has transformed into a dragon with the sword Nothung. (AF Fotografie/Alamy Stock Photo) Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 15, Number 1, pp. 36–48, Print ISSN 1934-2039, Online ISSN 1934-2047. © 2021 C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. DOI: 10.1080/19342039.2021.1862593. Isabelle Meier, The Classic, Banished, and Negative Hero 37 The Classic, Banished, and Negative Hero ISABELLE MEIER Heroes and heroines have enlivened fairytales, myths, and stories throughout the centuries and in all cultures, and are even found in modern stories and films.1 They are an essential part of the cultural, collective story of society. Hero images transform over time; however, the hero archetype itself does not change. This is the thesis of the present contribution. The hero image can, on the one hand, represent an authoritarian figure, as Adolf Hitler was for many Germans and Josef Stalin for Russians; or, on the other, also be found in national freedom myths such as the story of William Tell, a Swiss folk hero, or in the case of Nelson Mandela, both of whom served as emancipatory figures. These images can also cement gender stereotypes such as the “strong unemotional hero” or the radiant or dark hero as seen in the figures of Batman and Superman. Inevitably, with such a vast topic, I chose to focus more on male heroic images; I explore female heroic images in a forthcoming book. C. G. Jung saw the hero myth as reflecting a stage of development, guiding the transition process from adolescence to adulthood (Stein 2006). The classic hero was youthful, often a male who emancipated himself from his parental imago in order to move into adulthood. In 1912 Jung began to study this stage of development and the hero myth/image. In his work Symbols and Changes of the Libido (later Symbols of Change [1912/1995]), he interpreted the American Miss Frank Miller’s personal fantasies through the lens of the classical hero, discuss ing them in a collective context. Based on the young American’s fantasy material, Jung developed the theme of the heroic journey and night sea voyage. The hero’s journey as a “quest” was closely related to Jung’s concept of individuation, which he developed later. I have been curious about what motivated Jung to write a book about the hero’s journey. Jung’s Predecessors In Symbols and Changes of the Libido Jung referred to The Age of the Sun God by the African explorer and ethnologist Leo Frobenius (1904). Frobenius collected myths about the sun god, which were published in four volumes. Throughout the world, Frobenius found a similar repetitive pattern in these myths: in societies close to the sea, the sun god is devoured by a whale, and in landlocked areas by a dragon, monster, or wolf. In one myth, the sun god symbolizes the sun as it sets in the west and rises in the east, and “by dividing the beast into [whose] body he has entered, the sun hero creates the earth from his lower body and the sky from his upper body” (Frobenius 1904, 180ff.). In many versions the imprisoned hero is able to light a fire inside the beast, which causes him to be spit out. This is the night 38 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 15 : 1 / WINTER 2021 sea voyage of the sun god. After the ascent, renewal of the earth begins with the sunrise. The pattern that Frobenius derived from the various myths consists of several stages: banishing, devouring, kindling the fire, and hatching. This pattern is seen in the fairytale Little Red Riding Hood, when the girl loses her way and, in one version of the story, is devoured by the wolf and then freed from his stomach. According to Frobenius, later myths speak of the virgin mother who is impregnated by the sunbeam (the sun god) in a “conceptio immaculata” and gives birth to a boy. After the birth, the boy is placed in a box, a barrel, or basket (analogies are also the ark or ship) to be cast out into the darkness. This is the boy’s night sea journey. When Frobenius published his work, it aroused interest among psychoanalysts. Jung’s interest was also reflected in the work of others such as Otto Rank (1884–1939), a close collaborator of Sigmund Freud and later editor of the magazine Imago. At Freud’s suggestion, Rank wrote a book in 1908, four years after Frobenius published his works, about the “myth of the birth of the hero,” in which he began to interpret myths in terms of developmental psychology (Rank 2000). Rank found that if “the hero’s normal relationship with father and mother was regularly disturbed, then the assumption is not unfounded that something must lie in the nature of the hero that is capable of causing such a disturbance” (77). The hero image/imago emerges as the child becomes an adult. According to Rank and early classical psychoanalytic theorists, children first idealize their parents, especially the father. In puberty, however, a detachment, or separation, begins that is driven by revenge and the unconscious tension between father and son for the attention of the mother and motivated by disappointment or anger in the parents. As Rank noted, “The heroic act [therefore lies] in overcoming the father” (2000, 115). Rank based this developmental-psychological view on his interpretation of ancient myths. In ancient myths the father often receives a prophecy that his son will one day become a powerful man. Motivated by the father’s fear of the son’s rivalry, sons are, therefore, abandoned in a vessel in water or in a cave. In Greek myths, the ancient heroes Oedipus, Paris, and Hector experienced this, as did the Babylonian Gilgamesh, the Hebrew Moses, and the ancient Indian Karna. As an adolescent, the son takes revenge, says Rank: “When it [the child] has matured, in varied ways it finds its parents again, . takes revenge on the father, is recognized and achieves greatness and fame” (2000, 91). Rank sees the ego as analogous to the hero who wants to separate from his parents and become independent. The main problem of the young person is the father onto whom the youth projects hostile feelings, just as the father is threatened by the birth of his son and orders the son’s banishment. For Rank, the box, basket, and cave are mother symbols, which signify a return to the protecting womb (2000, 156). In this view the mother appears as a “close ally of the rebellious son, who saves him from the persecutions of the father” (159). The mother protects the child’s right to life. Freud (1910) followed in similar footsteps with his depiction of the Oedipus complex. C. G. Jung’s View of the Hero’s Quest Jung was probably aware of this work by Rank and from 1906 he was in close contact with Freud. Around 1910 he also read the four books on Symbolism and Mythology of Ancient Isabelle Meier, The Classic, Banished, and Negative Hero 39 Peoples by Friedrich Creuzer, a professor of classical philology and ancient history from Heidelberg (Creuzer 1819–1821). Jung had returned to Zürich from abroad and these books fell into his hands . and it ignited! I read like a maniac, working my way with burning interest through a mountain of mythological and eventually Gnostic material and ended up in total confusion . [I] could not help but discover the close relationship of ancient mythology to the psychology of the primitives,2 which led me to an intensive study of the latter. (Jaffé 1961/1990, 166) The work of Friedrich Creuzer is not readily available. I had to go deep into the cave-like corridors of the Zürich Central Library until I finally found the four old volumes by Creuzer in the Old Prints section. Creuzer collected mountains of mythical material, yet he managed to develop some type of order. He organized the material under three headings, namely, “demonic,” “heroic,” and “divine,” although he was mainly interested in the connections between the three. The Greeks did not distinguish their hero images in these exact terms; a hero was also “semi-divine.” Creuzer maintained that Homer also referred to God with the word daimon (Creuzer 1820, vol. 3, 27). The hero, often the child of a human and a god or goddess, lives between the divine and demonic powers; according to Creuzer, this is the stuff from which myths are created. Jung was fascinated and very much taken with this view. It was diametrically opposed to that of Rank and Freud. Jung wrote: “Freud’s simultaneous interests in these matters made me uneasy, as I thought his theory prevailed over fact. In the middle of this study I came across the fantasy material of a young American woman, Miss Miller, whom I did not know” (Jaffé 1961/ 1990, 166).