Maureen Murdock

International Potter Strike fandom, you know, converging in a brilliant fanzine put together by Patricia Tarantino and company.

Um, anyway, the last two issues featured pretty long form articles by Iris TM about the work of Maureen Murdock and Victoria Lynn Schmidt and their work on the heroine's journey.

Now, Murdock really broke this down.

It, it, she's a Jungian psychotherapist, I think.

Where the heroine's journey does not culminate in this sort of victory, her quest typically ends with wholeness, an integration of polarities that usually include opposites associated with the masculine and feminine.

Now, Maureen Murdock is generally regarded as the first to chart the heroine's journey as an alternative to Joseph Campbell's hero's journey.

She was a student of Campbell's, and she came to believe that the hero's journey model did not adequately address the psychospiritual journey of women, so she developed the model based on her work with women in therapy.

When she showed it to Campbell in 1983, Campbell reportedly said, "Women don't need to make the journey.

All she has to do is realize that she's the place that people are trying to get to." So perhaps Campbell viewed the hero's journey as a journey towards wholeness, and in a patriarchal society in which men subordinate qualities that are traditionally associated with feminine, the search for wholeness would lead to their reclaiming of these so-called feminine qualities and values.

But he never really considered the same type of reclaiming for women.

So Maureen Murdock wrote up the model and described it, The Heroine's Journey: Women's Quest for Wholeness, and she divided it into 10 stages.

The first is that the heroine separates from the feminine.