Are you really the hero of your story?

Your dominant function might be your worst enemy

Here’s the dictionary definition of ‘hero’:

a person who is admired or idealized for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities.

In typology, John Beebe associates Carl Jung’s Hero archetype with the dominant function:

the hero symbolizes what Jung calls the dominant function of consciousness and is thus an image of the cutting edge of the ego. For Jung (1939/1959), “Consciousness needs a centre, an ego to which something is conscious”

This has been a popular name for those who ascribe to Beebe’s eight function model. As Susan Storm puts it:

When it comes to personality type, each of us has a special gift or strength that, if fostered, can be harnessed in an incredible way… This is the function we use when we are “leading the charge” and completely sure of our direction and ability. This is the function we use when we enter a “flow” state and when we feel capable and competent. The hero function is positive, confident, and consciously controlled.

Courage, confidence, strength. It’s quite easy to equate our dominant function with being the hero. Some parts of the community even referred to it as a superhero with infinite power that flies around leading a life impervious to pain. And personally, I think we’ve fallen in love a little too hard with that.

We’ve deviated from Jung’s definition of the hero archetype to the Marvel type of hero. Whether they were intentional or not, content creators today using ‘hero’ have tapped into our desires to be in control of our lives with our special gifted abilities. But what makes us heroes? Should we feel heroic about being conscious..? Did our ego self-inflate itself, yet again, proclaiming as a hero?

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

We’ve been reinterpreting ‘hero’ wrong. We’ve confused its two meanings of a demigod fighting villains and of a story main protagonist. When we talk about discovering ourselves using Jungian functions, it’s not about having gifted superpowers fighting villains (‘shadow’ and ‘villain’ are not the same) nor about fulfilling a special purpose. It’s about a natural phenomenon that happens to everybody. It’s the story of ‘you’ growing up coming to terms with existing.

Let’s take all of those superpowers away and have a look at being the protagonist of our story. Jung’s work of individuation is framed as a mythological narrative of the ego’s acquaintance with the unconscious, which Joseph Campbell also talked about at length. We can borrow Campbell’s idea of the Hero’s journey here:

Life is a journey of individuation. As long as we’re alive, we are experiencing the cyclic tensions between our dominant function’s gravity and our oppositional function’s impulses. Notice how there’s no end to the process. There’s no destination, only the journey. You don’t ever become individuated, you are individuating.

Individuation doesn’t mean the dominant and oppositional functions have reached an end state of equilibrium. When your ego meets the unconscious, it dies and is reborn anew. Through each cycle, you’re reinventing yourself. The measure of personal growth is the number of cycles you went through on the Hero’s journey. How “healthy” you are depends on how appreciative you are about the process of killing your ego and learning from your oppositional function over and over.

Killing your ego is not easy though. Thanks to Ego, we fulfill our deep needs to feel safe and in control. It has figured a working survival strategy, filtering what’s good and bad. So why risk it all for the unknown? Why not be happy with what we have? Why fix it if it’s not broken? These are exactly what your ego would ask!

With a myriad of effective defense mechanisms, you avoid the trials and tribulations your ego deemed as threats. It’s so good at this, it grows its power by latching itself onto the dominant function, your most capable process of engaging with reality. Then it hogs all of your conscious energy for maximum survival.

Everything that’s not helpful for survival is seen as grotesque, wasteful, inferior, and must be repressed. Eventually, Ego turns into the only thing you listen to. Whatever it tells you, through your dominant function, is the only real thing you know. It becomes your truth, your reality. When Ego is all that’s left, letting go of it can feel suicidal.

Surviving is consequently your sole purpose in life. Everything is a threat. Every moment triggers Ego to defend. Ego has everything to lose. Ego has to prevail. It has to save the day. It has to do the thankless job of being a hero. Its selfless act must be recognized.

Beebe mentioned about possibly developing a superiority complex:

The superior function, not surprisingly, is the part of the ego we are most ready to claim ownership of, because it is associated with a sense of competence and potential mastery. The archetype that grants us this confidence in relation to the superior function (around which it is possible to develop a superiority complex) I have named the hero in a man and the heroine in a woman. This is a part of the psyche that welcomes facing challenges, that takes pleasure in recalling its past successful exploits, that revels in its unflagging reliability.

I’d add with some mental gymnastics, Ego also finds comfort with an inferiority complex. In the end, it wants to be in control and be validated for staying in the comfort of not having to die. Getting through the day only to fight again another day, the cycle continues. The Hero’s journey goes on.

Again, for as long we’re alive, we’re individuating, we’re uniting the opposite parts of ourselves. The difference now, as represented in the schematic above, is we don’t have conscious control of our individuation process. For the journey to go on, the unconscious has to force its way into our conscious awareness to get our ego’s attention.

The unconscious projects out onto our reality trying to remind us to go through the trials and failures. Our revelations and atonements are overdue. When we realize we’ve been unhappy, we go through life crises and act out in compensating behaviors. When everyone’s mean to us, it’ll be by having epiphanies that we’ll realize we’re the ones who are mean to everybody else. Maybe we’re not the heroes we think we are but our own worst enemy. When we realize that, you gotta wonder who’s been the real hero all along.