Telling a Better Story: An interview with Dr. John Bucher, Part I of II

Dr. John Bucher is the Executive Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, as well as a celebrated author and an alumni of the Mythology & Depth Psychology program at Pacifica. He will be teaching in the “Joseph Campbell: Myth & Storytelling as a Gateway to Psyche and Soul” certificate program, offered by Pacifica Extension in partnership with the Joseph Campbell Foundation, August 22, 2024 – November 7, 2024. For more information and to register, visit us here. Dr. Bucher will also be a keynote speaker at Pacifica’s Journey Week. I’m delighted to speak with John about his upcoming certificate and work.  This is Part I of II.

Angela Borda: As a child of the 1980s, I love Joseph Campbell and was formed by his impact on popular culture, most specifically the hero’s journey as a concept. Recently I’ve noticed some misconceptions in depth psychology about Campbell’s work, describing him as a sort of lay person, who simplified ideas so that the masses could digest them. I’ve wondered where this comes from and what his future in the field of depth psychology will be. What is your take on his work and relevance to our current day? 

John Bucher: Campbell himself had an interest in psychology and was a fan of Jung and references him quite a bit. He never set out to contribute to the field of depth psychology per se, since his focus was on comparative religion and mythology. He wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces using a lot of Jung’s work to hold a psychological lens to mythological stories and motifs. And he highlighted the universal patterns he saw around the world through that lens. Just like anyone’s work, there are things he got right and things he got wrong. Certainly he is deserving of credit for opening ideas that have been helpful to people throughout the years.  

I get a bit suspicious when we try to completely write someone off because we disagree with a particular view they had or the lens with which they were working. Campbell’s framework was meant to be descriptive not necessarily prescriptive. However, we’ve also talked with researcher Dr. Ben Rogers on our podcast, where at Boston College he and his colleagues have been doing research about people who’ve embraced the hero’s journey as a way to reflect on their own journey, and they’ve found that these people tend to find more happiness and meaning in their life when they have applied that lens. There are a lot of people who have been impacted by Campbell’s work, and we should be hesitant to write off their experiences simply because some people believe Campbell didn’t hold the credentials he should have to engage in the research that he did.  

That said, certainly his work is worthy of critique as well as credit. His models aren’t perfect, and the foundation makes it a point to “never try to save Campbell from himself.” But we do think it’s important that people understand his ideas and give them a fair shake. A lot of people who critique him have actually read very little of his work. They’ve heard about the hero’s journey and know of it as an idea, rather than having read the book and contended with his specific ideas.  

Angela: Can you speak about the hero’s journey and Maureen Murdock’s adaptation of it in the form of the heroine’s journey? I hear these terms everywhere in the context of depth psychology. What will you be examining about these in the course? 

John: We will take an honest and fair look at the work of Joseph Campbell and see why it’s had such an impact on so many people. We’ll look at how it has benefitted us as mythologists and depth psychologists. Like any thinker, Campbell built on the work of those who came before him, such as C.G. Jung and a number of other thinkers. It was his hope that people would build on his own work, as well. So, in that spirit, we will explore those who did, which brings us to the heroine’s journey. Maureen Murdock [a longtime instructor at Pacifica] is a mentor of mine, and was the chair of my dissertation at Pacifica, so I am a big fan of her work. In this class, we’ll also look at a model of the collective journey that we’ve been working on at the foundation, which looks at what happens when a group goes on a journey together rather than an individual. We also look beyond The Hero with a Thousand Faces, because Campbell wrote a number of books after that. He wrote The Masks of Gods series to examine the progression of human history and the way myth worked in different times of human history, which is important to understanding Campbell. So we will go beyond the surface level of Campbell and go into the deeper levels of his work as we try to understand human beings through the lens of the mythic, as he articulated it. 

Angela: You’ve been very kind in fielding some of the misconceptions about Campbell. So now let’s turn to more of what’s positive about Joseph Campbell! Why do you view him as so important to mythology and depth psychological work? And how does his work interact with Jungian archetypes? 

John: Campbell was a big fan of Jung and tried to take the things Jung explored even deeper mythologically. Campbell was interested in how we could hold a psychological lens to stories that had been told around the world. And while we greatly focus our conversations about Campbell around hero stories, one of the areas he doesn’t get enough credit for is the discussion of storytelling as its own artform within mythology, which is something he talked about. Being a powerful storyteller himself, he showed us how storytelling is an important aspect of myth. One of Joseph Campbell’s most significant accomplishments is bringing an awareness around the importance of mythology to the modern world.  

A lot of people saw him on PBS in “The Power of Myth, and it was the first time they’d thought about these things since they’d had to read books on mythology in the sixth grade. It was a big deal to have someone to say “This stuff matters in your life now. These characters and stories and archetypes matter now.” He brought an awareness around the mythological to culture that hadn’t been present before. I think we’re still feeling the reverberations of that, and we’ve seen how impactful that awareness has been in our own storytelling in popular culture in the United States today.  

This discussion continues in Part II of the interview. 

To learn more or register for the “Joseph Campbell: Myth & Storytelling as a Gateway to Psyche and Soul” certificate program, offered by Pacifica Extension in partnership with the Joseph Campbell Foundation, August 22, 2024 – November 7, 2024, visit us here. To learn more about Pacifica’s Journey Week, visit us here.