Joseph Campbell Meets George Lucas – Part I (2015)

I think that was the joke. It's obvious Star Wars stole a lot of ideas from Dune. But many people think it's the opposite since star wars predates the Dune movies.

I think it is a form of scientism to say Campbell is "wrong" but people love scientism. For many it is standard orthodoxy and a blind spot of mass stupidity.

I think Campbell is the pop version of The Golden Bough. I have only read a little of the The Golden Bough but is so immense, alien and unrelatable. I have also read how James George Frazer was also "wrong". As if the conclusions of a 19th century Victorian somehow negates the 12 volumes of collected mythology. Independent thought and reasoning though is not a strength of those prone to scientism.

I was also really into Jung and Campbell in college, until I realized that the whole enterprise they promoted is not as interesting as I thought. Freud also revered dreams but he saw the psychoanalytic process as one of meaning-making between analyst and analysand. Sure, he rarely embodied that lofty goal, and usually imposed his own meaning on his patients. I believe dreams have no grand universal meaning, and there is no collective unconscious. Dreams only mean as much as we imbue them with meaning.

It's also just total BS, I'm sorry. Most writers do not lie down and dream, and then wake up and write what they experienced (though that is a practice for some people). The art of storytelling is a conscious act of artistic creation. This is true of every written version we have of every myth. We are never getting some kind of direct access to some universal dream world. We're getting as much of the Beowulf Poet or "Homer" or J, E, P, and D as anything else.

You avoided the actual substantive critique in the post. Namely, that Campbell's system doesn't even work for the most canonical works in Western literature.

I don't know what Jung has to do with anything. But if helps, I also think he was a crank, and the collective unconscious is a neat metaphor and nothing more.