Chill Out, Jo-Cam

The other day a friend of mine asked me what I have against the "mythologist" Joseph Campbell.

Every time the guy's name comes up, I swear; also, I love mythology. So what's your problem, my friend asked.

That's a fair question. I would like to give it a fair answer. Let me begin by acknowledging the personal aspect of my dislike.

When I say I love mythology, I mean I am working to make it part of my life's work. So, when people conflate mythology with Joseph Campbell—as if the two were one, and there were no room in this realm of inquiry for anything else—I find it annoying. I'm not interested in peering at mythology through the lens that Campbell made. I'm interested in applying a different focus and filter to bring out aspects of mythology that Campbell wasn't after.

Now, on a collegial level, I don't disagree with every last thing Campbell said. I too have long believed that one of the essential functions of mythology is to answer our basic, existential questions, like who am I, where did the world come from, what does it mean and what should I do.

But the way he approaches those stories is, frankly, gross to me. Take monomyth, for example. Monomyth (that's James Joyce's term) refers to narrative patterns that repeat themselves in stories throughout the world. It's a fascinating topic—as long as you're not flattening the differences between stories and treating their cultural specificity as a bothersome burr, which Campbell absolutely does. That's disrespectful. To do so requires you to ignore not only the distinctions between stories, but whole swaths of storytelling that don't fit the mold you're constructing: that don't fit your theory. To ignore these things is to be ignorant.

Then there's gender. I don't have space in this post even to start on that one.

What I really want to focus on in this moment is Campbell's starting point: the psychological assumptions that he brings to his work. There's a serious problem here, and it makes me question whether he knows what myths even are.

One of Campbell's big influences was Jung. He agreed "with Carl Jung’s texts explaining psychological phenomena by using archetypes—which in Jungian psychology is a primitive mental image inherited from early human ancestors and supposed to be present in the collective unconscious." His approach has some flavors of psychoanalysis as well, a line of thought that Freud came up with to explore the unconscious thoughts and mental images that influence how we behave.

As a postmodern with a literature degree, I'm not about to say that's an invalid way to look at any given story. It's not wrong or useless to view mythology through a psychological or psychoanalytical lens. Literary criticism is big enough to look at anything in any number of ways.

What I will say is that as long as you're analyzing mythology from a psychoanalytical perspective, you're lifting it out of its genre and treating it as something it is not. Myths are not allegories. They're not metaphors. They weren't invented for us to study, pick apart and write papers on. Rather, myths—your own myths—are there for you to take like communion into yourself, make them part of your body and become them, let them become you. Like this. Not like this.

This is important to me, and (alongside his universalism and his views on gender) it remains my primary sticking point with Campbell's work. The purpose of a myth isn't to tell us about the human psyche. It's to tell us about, and to deepen our relationship with, the world.