“The hero myth,” psychologist Keiron Le Grice explains, “carries the individualism of the West to its logical conclusion, fulfilling the Western spiritual ideal, leading the individual self to its own transformation through the inner encounter with the depths of the psyche and spirit.”7 Adapting the character of the Western mind and culture, the

In 1949, Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a detailed study of the archetypal pattern of the hero. By distilling a wealth of cross-cultural myths and combining culturally specific hero traits, he identified archetypal phases of the hero’s journey, calling it the monomyth of the hero.12

The term “depth psychology” was coined in the early 20th century by Swiss psychologist Eugen Bleuler to describe psychoanalytic approaches to therapy that take the unconscious into account. Since the 1970s, depth psychology has come to refer to those theories and therapies pioneered by psychologists such as Sigmund Freud, Pierre Janet, William

Life is filled with movements of descending and ascending. The Greeks called ascending palingenesia, “the recurrence of birth.” We never fully ascend from the underworld. We’re in a constant process of descending followed by integrating, and each roundtrip affects the rest of our lives.

The inner capacity to sacrifice stability and comfort in order to pursue self-growth is heroic.

The ancient Greek cosmos encompassed both the dayworld and the underworld, the telluric (“upper earth”) and chthonic (“under earth”). In accord with this vision, the divine pantheon was separated into gods that belonged to the deep earth, cthonioi, such as Persephone, Hades, and Hecate, and Olympians such as Athena, Apollo, and Hera, who were of

The themes of morality, judgment, and punishment were adopted by the Judeo-Christian mythos. Ideas that have made it almost impossible not to place our thoughts and behaviors into the categories of good or bad. We judge ourselves and others, ruminating on whether we’re smart, good at what we do, liked, pretty, contributing enough, or belong.

The mother archetype also carries ambivalent and negative aspects such as devouring or life-hoarding witch, dragon, serpent, grave, or deep water. The mother can stifle horizons – giving life but also entrapping her offspring. The mother is both creation and destruction: the original matrix from which all life springs that can also paralyze ego

The individual we choose to be has a dark double: the person we choose not to be. In Ursula Le Guin’s The Wizard of Earthsea, the protagonist, Ged, unleashes his shadow (gebbeth) into the world. In Earthsea, each being has a true name that holds immense power. When it is revealed that the gebbeth knows his true name, Ged is stripped of his power