Journey

Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘journey’ operates as one of the most generative and polysemous organizing metaphors — encompassing at once the hero’s mythological ordeal, the soul’s post-mortem passage, the individuating psyche’s inward movement, and the narrative arc of lived human suffering. Campbell provides the most systematic treatment, codifying the monomythic departure-initiation-return structure as the skeletal form underlying all quest narratives, from Navaho sandpainting lore to Dante’s Commedia. Banzhaf extends this framework into Tarot’s Major Arcana, reading the sequence of cards as a pictorial grammar of the hero’s night sea journey through death and return to wholeness. Von Franz and Kerényi approach the journey from the archaic side, tracing shamanic celestial ascent and the Hermetic psychopomp’s movement between worlds as precursors to analytical psychology’s concept of individuation. Kurtz and Frank bring the metaphor into therapeutic and existential registers: for Kurtz, journey-as-pilgrimage captures the open-ended, non-triumphalist character of spiritual recovery; for Frank, illness transforms the patient into a quest narrator whose story is precisely the discovery of what kind of journey has been taken. Abrams situates the circuitous journey — departure from and return to the self — as the defining Romantic philosophical plot, from Hegel’s Phenomenology onward. The central tension across these treatments is whether the journey is ultimately a movement outward in space or inward toward psychic wholeness, and whether its telos is homecoming, transformation, or the recognition that the path itself is the destination.

In the library 19 passages

the spirituality of imperfection offers an alternative image for the spiritual life: that of journey… a pilgrimage involves not a settled and determined lockstep march to a fixed point, but a winding, turning, looping, crisscrossing, occasionally backtracking peregrination

Kurtz argues that the journey-as-pilgrimage metaphor, distinguished from linear progress by its wandering and uncertainty, is the most adequate image for spiritual life and is enacted through the narrative format of storytelling.

Kurtz, Ernest, Ketcham, Katherine, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994thesis

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the idea that illness has been a journey emerges. The meaning of the journey emerges recursively: the journey is taken in order to find out what sort of journey one has been taking.

Frank argues that illness quest narratives are structured by a recursive journey logic — drawn from Campbell — in which the meaning of the passage is only disclosed in the course of traveling it.

Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995thesis

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THE JOURNEY OF THE HERO, 15 Origin and Meaning of the Hero’s journey

Banzhaf’s entire work is structured around the hero’s journey as the interpretive key to the Tarot Major Arcana, treating each card as a stage in a mythic and psychological itinerary toward wholeness.

Banzhaf, Hajo, Tarot and the Journey of the Hero, 2000thesis

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the figure of the circuitous journey homeward… Hegel developed into the sustained vehicle for his Phenomenology of the Spirit, which recounts the vicissitudes of the spirit at the crucial stages of its laborious educational journey

Abrams identifies the circuitous journey — departure, alienation, and return home to the self — as the master-trope of Romantic philosophy and literature, most fully elaborated in Hegel’s Phenomenology.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis

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if it really is your adventure — if it is a journey that is appropriate to your deep spiritual need or readiness helpers will come along the way to provide magical aid.

Campbell argues that the mythic journey activates archetypal helpers precisely when the traveler’s readiness is genuine, framing the adventure as a correspondence between inner necessity and outer symbolic event.

Campbell, Joseph, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, 2004thesis

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They stand for the descent into the underworld and the return to the light… The motif of the journey to the other world, the sea journey at night, is not only familiar in all the religious traditions of the nations of both East and West, but also agrees without exception on each of the essential points.

Banzhaf establishes the night sea journey — descent into death and return — as a universal cross-cultural motif structuring the darkest cards of the Tarot and all mythological traditions simultaneously.

Banzhaf, Hajo, Tarot and the Journey of the Hero, 2000thesis

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To be whole and live both sides is the goal of the journey. Reconciling both sides is consequently the theme of the next card.

Banzhaf frames the hero’s journey through the Tarot as fundamentally aimed at the reconciliation of conscious and unconscious, masculine and feminine — that is, at Jungian individuation.

Banzhaf, Hajo, Tarot and the Journey of the Hero, 2000thesis

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In myths or dreams, a lonely journey often symbolizes the liberation of transcendence… Many people may want some change from a containing pattern of life; but the freedom gained by travel is no substitute for a true inner liberation.

Jung distinguishes the symbolic journey — as dream or mythic image pointing toward inner transcendence — from mere literal travel, insisting on the psychological priority of the inward movement.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Man and His Symbols, 1964thesis

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the motif of the ‘ascension of the soul,’ or a celestial journey taken by the soul, occurring in each case after death and in some cases even during the lifetime of the elect who experiences it in a state of ecstasy.

Von Franz traces the shamanic celestial journey as an archaic precursor to depth psychology’s understanding of individuation, linking ecstatic soul-travel to the transformation of the whole personality.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1975supporting

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they tell of a journey as a home coming. When these songs are sung over a man, the spirit of the man makes the journey that the song describes. Upon the rainbow he moves from mountain to mountain

Campbell presents the Navaho ceremonial journey-song as a paradigm in which mythic narrative and ritual enactment fuse, the sung journey being simultaneously cosmological map and psychic healing.

Campbell, Joseph, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, 1986supporting

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the goal is only important as an idea; the essential thing is the opus which leads us to the goal: that is the goal of a lifetime.

Drawing on Jung, Banzhaf argues that the journey’s telos — wholeness — functions as a regulative idea, while the transformative work of the path itself constitutes the real psychological achievement.

Banzhaf, Hajo, Tarot and the Journey of the Hero, 2000supporting

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the journey to a huge mountain in the North to acquire (or receive) wisdom… the legend of Aristeas then reveals the journey of the free soul in a trance

Bremmer documents the archaic Greek free-soul journey in trance as a cross-cultural wisdom-seeking motif connecting Aristeas, Gilgamesh, and early shamanic traditions.

Jan N. Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983supporting

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The doctor-priests, Abaris and Aristeas of Proconnesus, healed and prophesied while in an ecstatic trance-state… He descended into the cave of the healer-god Trophonius and experienced there the splitting of the seams of his skull, from which his soul emerged to wander about the beyond.

Von Franz surveys Greco-Roman ecstatic soul-journeys as evidence for the universality of the inner journey motif, linking them to the shamanic precedents that informed Jung’s model of the individuation process.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1975supporting

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Essential motifs of the hero’s journey were apparently read from the heavens. Above all, the movements of the two great lights, the sun and the moon, have served as models.

Banzhaf argues that the hero’s journey is cosmologically grounded, with solar and lunar cycles functioning as the celestial templates from which the archetypal stages of the earthly hero’s path were derived.

Banzhaf, Hajo, Tarot and the Journey of the Hero, 2000supporting

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it is different from the hero’s journey, that perhaps its element is time, where the hero’s is space. It is this matter of endurance, staying there and sitting it out.

A discussion partner of Campbell’s proposes that the heroine’s journey is constituted by temporal endurance rather than spatial conquest, marking a significant gender-differentiated revision of the monomyth.

Campbell, Joseph, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, 2004supporting

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They can also be seen as three ordeals besetting the modern hero-journey. The themes of ‘hero’ and ‘transformation’ are inseparable

Campbell reads Freud’s three narcissistic wounds of science as successive ordeals within a modern hero-journey, connecting depth psychology’s genealogy to the mythic structure of transformation.

Campbell, Joseph, The Power of Myth, 1988supporting

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Therapy is always a dance of safety and risk, not only for clients but also for therapists… Two Clinical Journeys

Ogden employs ‘journey’ as a clinical metaphor for the therapeutic process, framing dual transformation — of client and therapist — within a shared relational passage through trauma and attachment.

Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015aside

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