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spiritual_emergency · Feb 10, 2007, 12:51 AM

Anyone reading this post, whether it be at the time of it's creation or in some distant future might be wondering -- What does the Hero's Journey have to do with schizophrenia?

The connect is... those who go through the experience in a benign environment -- that is to say, without stigmatizing labels, drugs, or forced care that seeks to stifle the emerging content -- in those individuals, the emerging content itself begins to coalesce into a pattern that looks remarkably like The Hero's Journey. Here's an excerpt from Joseph Campbell's Power of Myth where he addresses that aspect...

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BROWN: As a psychiatrist I'm particularly curious about your work with John Perry. How did you first meet him?

CAMPBELL: That was a marvelous meeting. Mike wrote to me one time and said he'd like me to come out and talk with John Perry, a psychiatrist in San Francisco, about schizophrenia. I said, I don't know anything about schizophrenia. He said, Well, he'd like to have me give a lecture anyhow. I said, Well, how would James Joyce be? And he said, That would be just fine.

So I agreed to come out and talk with John Perry. And Perry sent me some of his monographs, his articles, on the symbolism of schizophrenia. The sequence with which these images emerge in a patient's mind, who's in a deep schizoid crack-up. And it matched The Hero with a Thousand Faces, just like that, step by step.

And so there again I came to understand the relationship with something that had been simply a scholarly interest of mine in mythology to actual life problems.

And it's been pretty exciting ever since.

Source: The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work</blockquote>

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Perry relates his own discovery of this pattern in his earlier book, The Far Side of Madness...

<blockquote>The terror of psychosis – and the terrifying treatments to which the “mental patient” is subjected – remains a source of bafflement to the outsider and a source of frustration to many practitioners in the mental health field. Although the literature is fraught with descriptions of symptoms, diagnoses, theories, and methods of treatment, few researchers address the patient as an equal. Rare, indeed, is the practitioner who has come to view psychosis as a strange sign of health: as an attempt to heal or as a stage in a developmental process that transports the subject beyond sickness or health and into a positive transformation of the self.

Such an exception is John Weir Perry. His Far Side of Madness remains a classic in the field for all these reasons. Working in the lonely tradition of Carl Jung and R.D. Laing, who each viewed psychosis as potentially purposive and telic in nature, Perry describes the goals – and the terrible dangers – that are typically portrayed in the psychotic journey.

Perry’s work in traditional psychiatric settings led him to conclude that those in the thrall of an acute psychotic episode are rarely listened to or met on the level of their visionary state of consciousness. Instead, every imaginable way to silence the patients – to ignore and to disapprove of their nonrational language and experience – was called into play, thereby increasing their sense of isolation, alienation, and so-called madness. (Although the book was first published in 1974, things have not substantially changed in state mental hospitals or in community residence settings. To explore the strange imagery of psychosis with a client in a counseling session is viewed as “feeding into their delusional system,” and it is sternly discouraged by psychiatrists and social workers.) Perry’s work with those in acute stages of psychosis revealed that their pre-psychotic personalities were the true source of the “sickness.” Forced to live an emotionally impoverished life, the psyche had reacted by forcing a transformation in the form of a “compensating” psychosis, during which a drama in depth was enacted, forcing the initiate to undergo certain developmental processes.

Such psychic processes, which are accompanied by rich, emotional imagery, yield amazing parallels to classical myths and to obscure rituals of antiquity:<blockquote>The individual finds himself living in a psychic modality quite different from his surroundings. He is immersed in a myth world ... His emotions no longer connect with ordinary things, but drop into concerns and titanic involvements with an entire inner world of myth and image.</blockquote>Although the imagery is of a general, archetypal nature (“imagery that pertains to all men and all times”), it also portrays the key issues of the individual undergoing the crisis. Therefore, once lived through on this mythic plane, and once the process of withdrawal nears its end, the images must be linked to specific problems of daily life. Thus, the archetypal affect images await a reconnection to their natural context: to the personal psychological complexes (which are externally projected).

Perry searched for and finally discovered a regular pattern of imagery and ideation in the psychotic process. The “negative self-image” is typically compensated by an “overblown” archetypal one, the latter manifesting in imagery such as that of the hero, clown, saint, ghost, or sovereign leader. In addition, there is a sense of “participating in some form of drama or ritual performance.”<blockquote>Most significantly, ten sets of motifs emerged:
[*] symbols of the center[*] death[*] return to beginnings[*] cosmic conflict[*] the threat of the opposite sex[*] apotheosis[*] sacred marriage[*] new birth[*] new society, and [*] the quadrated world </blockquote>Following the Jungian school of thought (from which Perry emerged), comparative symbolism and cross-cultural studies were used to uncover a holistic context in which to view such motifs in a larger context. Research led to the discovery of the same sequence of imagery in archaic religions and in other cultural structures. Most significant to the author is that “the myth and ritual form that resembles it is the principle and central rite of the civilizations of remote antiquity, and parallels the image sequence step for step.” That is, the “ceremonial pattern of sacral kingship,” found in the ancient Near East, the Mediterranean, Europe, and the Far East, which involves an annual renewal of the cosmos during the New Year.

The author devotes an entire chapter to the psychic significance of kingship, and he refers to its importance throughout The Far Side of Madness. Indeed, the correspondence is striking: in the New Year festivals, we find “a creation rite also emphasizing the center, the beginnings, death and renewal, the sacred combat and sacred marriage, and the other elements of the process.” The sacred functions of kingship represents a projection of “man’s spiritual potential as an individual.” Only with the integration of such functions in the psyche of the common man was the era of the sacred king to give way to a new era: one ushered in by “great prophets and founders of the great religions,” and characterized by a revaluation of the individual and the Eros principle. Thus, kingship reflects an archetypal pattern of growth: one progressing through dismemberment, reconstitution, and the rebirth of psyche, paralleling the “outer” historical processes (which themselves were probably based on inner archetypal correlates) and ending in the Eros principle described above (the return to love).

Source: Psychosis as Purposive</blockquote>

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