the man with a thousand faces joseph campbell

In Campbell's opinion, this isn't a healthy way to live.

In the modern world, we try to halt the progress of life: we want to stay young, stay strong, never grow old, and never die.

In short, if we want to know how to be brave in the face of trouble, to enjoy the good things life sends our way, and to understand why life works the way it does, we look to our myths.

Mythology provides symbols to help us understand these transitions in life, and how our triumphs and heartbreaks can be reflected in those symbols.

Dreams, and the stories that come from them, speak to the painful transitions we experience in life: growing up, finding a spouse, working hard for the things we want, saying goodbye to family members who die, and so on.

He discusses psychoanalysis, the science of reading dreams, and says that ancient cultures had their own rituals for reading dreams too.

Campbell talks about how the dream represents the way we face our fears: leaping into the unknown where there's great danger…but also rewards and treasures too.

The horse is sent to a barbershop and comes out as a man.

Campbell talks about another dream, this one from a woman afraid of a big white horse following her.

You can find this idea in ancient stories such as Oedipus, whose famous complex was based on killing his father and marrying his mother.

He explains how the father represents danger, the mother safety, and how killing the father to enjoy the attentions of the mother was pretty much what Freud was all about.

His mother comforts him in the dream, and Campbell points out how Freudian this all is.

He tells the story of a young American man who dreamed that he accidentally killed his father by dropping a hammer off the roof.

Psychology, too, he says, is down with those mythic vibes, in part because they help people – even modern people – understand what drives them.

Campbell jumps right in, discussing recent anthropological studies that have benefited from a mythic approach.

The man with a thousand faces joseph campbell