Excerpt from the podcast This Jungian Life (fantastic podcast… highly recommended) with Jungian analysts Deborah Lee, Lisa Marchiano, and Joseph Lee. Episode: “Humanizing the Hero” (Link)
LM: There are people that come into my consulting room who need do some heroic energy to push past anxiety or apathy or the belief that they’re only safe if they stay nested in their own cocoon. It is heroic energy that’s required to slay those internal demons.
JL: And this drive to slay the demons often constellates when there is a vision of the treasure, which can come in a dream, it can come in an intuition; the treasure -whether its gold or a golden goose or a magical lyre that sings to you- are metaphors for some potential inside of ourselves and for true and authentic feeling about ones destiny. So often, it’s difficult to mobilize somebody against the dragons of their lives if they don’t have at least a glimpse of the treasure. If Parsifal had never been given a glimpse of the Holy Grail, why would he possibly have left home and gone through this life long misery of searching? It’s the glimpse of the potential that leads us onward. And that glimpse comes from even just a momentary encounter with the true self, long before we’re actually mature enough to lay hold of it in its fullness. So when we catch a glimpse of this higher potential, -if we’re lucky- the archetype of the hero will activate even in some small measure, which will grant us the will and capacity to tolerate the repeated transformations that one needs in order to pursue wholeness and meaning in ones life… because that is the kind of agonizing grind of change that we all have to go through in order to attain the goal.
