Campbell and The (Lack of) Universality of Symbols

A brief note: I'm not trapped in time two to three weeks behind the rest of the class--it just took a while for me to figure out how to get my blogger account up and running. I'll be posting three separate blogs rapid-fire over the next three days.

The key to our first few weeks of discussion on Heroes and Mystics has been the art, significance, and meaning of symbols. This focus has, in some ways, been a celebration of the wonderful complexity of human interpretation and communication; it has also, simultaneously, been a point of struggle for me. 

The wonderful parts of symbols:

Symbols are terribly important–pervasive of human life and indicative of truths that transcend any one culture. Love, forgiveness, aspiration and achievement, community, purity, etc. ad nauseum. And they are so integral to the human experience that they transcend any one field as well. I’m in a class on rhetoric, and Kenneth Burke–a key figure in that realm of academia, also values them to an extraordinary degree. Same with Bakhtin and Orwell and all sorts of other writers from all sorts of other studies.

The difficult parts of symbols:

My discomfort began the moment I started reading The Hero With a Thousand Faces. I’ve read Campbell before and quite liked his work. This was not the same, though. I’ve pinned that difference in feeling on Campbell’s unexpected aggrandizement of Freud’s psychoanalytical theories.

Freud seems adamant that there is a common lexicon of symbols which serves as the basis of psychoanalysis on dreams. A woman’s presence in dream is a call to the ideal, nurturing mother. A man’s presence in the dream of a man is competition or a rival to best. Temptations manifest as physical, predictable apparitions.

In truth, I’m not sure I agree with any of that.

What Campbell goes on to display, (I believe surreptitiously disproving Freud) is that symbols are relative appeals to larger, transcendent ideals. To a Hindu, the water of the Ganges indicates holy cleansing and a space for ritual, patronage, and pilgrimage. To the rest of the world, it looks like a filthy river you’d come out of dirtier than when you entered. I think of symbols as a 2D drawing of a 3D shape. We see a higher something through it, and that higher something is consistent across all views, but the 2D drawings from different perspectives certainly do not look the same.

The difficulty is that this unfolded backwards. I was left with a feeling of wrongness reading Campbell’s praise for Freud but with little understanding why. I had to go through many more emotional phases than I tend to (and far more than I’d like) to come to this understanding.

The Silver Lining:

The process of pinpointing what I didn’t quite see eye-to-eye on was in some ways terrifying. Left unsolved, that road can lead to cynicism and disillusionment with one of the integral parts of human communication and development—and I certainly didn’t want that to become a part of my view on symbols.

The relief is that I didn’t end up in that rut. I feel reinvigorated right at the start of the semester (an amusing statement, considering most would hope for just “invigorated” without the “re-”) and excited to think on the further topics in the class.

Regardless of where I land on future discussions, I at least won’t be arguing with the framework itself (something I never wanted to argue with in the first place), and that brings me a great deal of peace.