Of Healing and Heroes

By Jan Joubert

In Northern America, we live in a media saturated culture. This creates many questions and implications for therapists about the effect of media on the personal psyche. Also, this raises questions about the therapeutic value and function of media techniques.

Joseph Campbell's Journey of the Hero (1941) continues to be one of the most influential narrative structures in media and can be intuitively recognized in most forms therof. From films, plays, and books to propaganda. It has been suggested by thinkers and researchers such as Campbell, Stanislav, Grof, and Paul Rebillot that Campbell's journey can have a tremendously transformative therapeutic application. They contend that is has been used for exactly this reason in story, ritual, and myth in different cultures around the world.

In this thesis, I describe an exploration of working with Joseph Campbell's journey of the Hero in an art therapy group, in which it was applied as a set of art therapy directives or sets of instructions. It was secondarily applied in this thesis as a lens through which to do an analysis of the theory, exploring the value of this research-group indirectly.

Using Narrative inquiry as method, I narrate the experience of the group, comprised of three adult participants attending for reasons of personal growth, as well as auto-ethnographically describing my own story as a research-intern-therapist.

Familiarity with my story allows the reader to differentiate between my voice and those of the participants, whose voices are refracted through my lens as writer-researcher-therapist.

I lastly narrate how this experience changed me professionally from process to presence-oriented therapist (Eberhart & Atkins, 2014), and I draw my own conclusions about the transformative value and function of the research group, suggesting what it is. As I can only explore, not prove value/function using Narrative Inquiry, the reader is given data and may decide for themselves what they believe that value and function is.