Counselor Development as The Hero’s Journey: Reflections from a Counselor Educator

Abstract

The use of the monomyth to shape the narratives of fiction with deep meanings, while feeling both new and recognizable, is consistently experienced across all cultures throughout time. As past publications have utilized this approach to subconscious symbolism to explain many experiences, it has not yet been utilized to explain the process of counselor development. The structures utilized in this exploration of the Hero’s Journey concept include the seminal work Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell (1949) being applied to the structure of counseling development as reviewed by Rønnestad and Skovholt (2003). Each stage of the journey will be translated into an understanding of how students grow from before their master’s program through their senior years as experts in the counseling field. The following article will engage this metaphor to explore the narrative of a counseling student on their quest to become a counseling professional through use of the stages from the monomyth as used to describe the Hero’s Journey.