Matei's Reviews > The Hero With a Thousand Faces

2/5 fundamentally flawed. In attempting to show the general patterns of mythology and their significance ( for which he relied on psychoanalysis, which was horribly misguided: Campbell notices himself that analyzing myths as scientific/historic artifacts is wrong; why should a psychoanalytical approach be right?) he presents a ton of examples for every stage, yet in doing so, removes them from their inherent context. Of course a lot of stories will point towards the same thing if we force the same meaning unto them ( I obviously can't speak for all the examples given, but for the ones I do know something about, I can see how he is twisting/ignoring their inherent point to force them into an universal pattern). Because of this, this feels very fragmented, like I was just reading a collection of snippets from various mythologies. I would have appreciated more explanations and interpretations from Campbell, a clearer presentation of the mythological superstructure and its implications, but these were hardly in the book at all. Which is a shame: the best parts of the book are when he ties things together and actually does a comparative study, rather than simple iterating through stories.