I am not a fan of Campbell, so put everything I write in that perspective. He draws heavily on Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), a contemporary of Freud. I spent two years reading Jung under the direction of one of his students, but then I was pointed away from that approach to folklore and mythology, given a new direction by my mentor, Sven S. Liljeblad (1899-2000) - all this to give you context for what I write.

Jung was amazing in the amount of material he gathered to support his idea of archetypes and the collective unconscious. His massive tomes are extremely difficult to read; they are presentations of his thorough research, but they are far short of salesmanship for the general public. Campbell was excellent at the salesmanship. His devotees will insist that he took Jung's ideas in his own direction, but that doesn't negate the fact that much of what he did was to popularize the profound work of Jung, who fades from the popular view.

My problem with Campbell - and even with Jung - is that much of what they have to say must be taken on faith. They are either right or not, but either way, nothing can be proven. They are rather like a really good literary analysis of a book - or of a play by Shakespeare - an analysis that may lend a great deal of insight, all without proving anything. The value of the insight is in the eyes of the beholder rather than its intrinsic value: the literary analysis has value if the person reading the review finds it meaningful. At the same time it has no value if it fails to strike a chord with the reader. And even if it strikes a chord, there is nothing there to build upon. For those who find Campbell meaningful, after that finding, there is little left to do except put the book back on the shelf when finished.

The following is an excerpt from my Introduction to Folklore dealing with Jung and Campbell - again, presented with the understanding of the context of my own point of view:

The popularity of one approach among non-folklorists warrants a digression. In the last part of the twentieth century, Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) created a great deal of interest in mythology and folklore with a series of publications on the subject. This was followed by a 1980s series of television interviews, which propelled Campbell to popularity, but not necessarily with all folklorists. To a certain extent, Campbell was relying on an older approach that Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) developed. Jung was a Swiss psychologist who studied with Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) but later broke with his mentor’s teachings to form his own approach to the study of the human mind. Jung developed the idea of the collective unconscious, maintaining in almost spiritual terms that all of humanity is linked by archetypes that existed in an unconscious common denominator. Ultimately, Jung implied that certain themes are woven into the fabric of the universe. According to Jung, all of humanity shared a symbolic vocabulary which manifests in dreams, mythology, folklore, and literature.

Jungian psychology was extremely popular during the upheavals of the 1960s when people looked for mystical explanations of life to unify all existence. Despite the faddish qualities of the late twentieth-century consumption of Jungian ideas, it is easy to regard Jung as an exceptional thinker with an extraordinary background of diverse reading. Campbell borrowed heavily from Jung, presenting many of these ideas in an easily consumable package that, in its turn, became something of a fad during the 1980s. Campbell drew not only on Jung, but also on Otto Rank’s 1932 publication, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero.

There are clearly many good ideas in this literature, but there are problems with the approach of Campbell, Jung, and Rank from the point of view of folklore studies. The first is that they tend to present the concept of tale types in mythology and folklore as though it were a new discovery. In other words, they ignore the highly developed bibliography that the discipline of folklore offers. The second, more serious problem is that this line scholarship makes no distinction between the core of a story and its culturally specific or narrator-specific variants and variations. The Jungian-Campbell approach treats any variant of a story as an expression of the collective unconscious, regardless of whether its form is the product of an individual storyteller’s idiosyncrasies or of the cultural predilections of a region made irrelevant by traveling to the next valley. And with this process, all the other variants are ignored, including ones that may contradict the initial observation. This does not mean that there are no valuable insights in the work of Jung and Campbell. There are, of course, but folklorists regard their approach as removed from their own discipline and flawed, to a certain extent.

Dundes presented a similar critique of Freudian-based psychoanalysis of folktales. In his The Study of Folklore (1965), he wrote that “the analysis is usually based upon only one version…To comparative folklorists who are accustomed to examining hundreds of versions of a folktale or folksong before arriving at even a tentative conclusion, this apparent cavalier approach to folklore goes very much against the grain. How does the analyst know, for example, whether or not the particular version he is using is typical and representative.” (107) Dundes also pointed out that often the “variant” presented by the psychological analysis is from “a children’s literature anthology, rather than directly from oral tradition.”