The Wounded Hero: Explorations in Mythology and the Performing Arts Sarah D. Holloway, Ph.D.

2010 In 2006 I was working at the Madigan Army Medical Center (MAMC) in Washington State as a Content Developer for afterdeployment.org. This psycho-educational website for returning military service members offers information, community resources, self-assessment tools, and interactive workshops on relevant topics such as Relationships, Anger Management, Parenting, Employment, and Post-Traumatic Stress. At the time that I was working for MAMC I was also completing my Masters degree and beginning my Doctorate in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute, based in Santa Barbara, California. For my doctoral dissertation I knew that I wanted to weave multicultural mythology, artistic expression, and healing from trauma into my research, and desperately hoped to find a way to fit my longtime love of puppetry into the mix as well. How to bring this eclectic combination of interests and passions together into a cohesive project, however, was not initially clear. Much of my time working at MAMC was spent researching and writing for the Spirituality module of afterdeployment.org, during which time I discovered that a modern military service members experience matched surprisingly well with almost all of the stages of Joseph Campbells "Heros Journey." Many people are familiar with Campbells famous theory of comparative mythology; in his seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces Campbell delved into the concept of a universal, human story playing itself out in the myths and sacred stories of cultures from around the world and throughout history. The Heros Journey is best explained in this well-known and oft-quoted passage by Campbell: [] the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world. (25)1 I imagine the Heros Journey as a psycho-spiritual voyage, a death and rebirth of self-perception that can occur when the psyche is confronted with an experience that ruptures familiar assumptions about life and human existence. Symbolic manifestations of the Heros Journey can be found in myths from all over the world the ancient Greek epic the Odyssey, Jacobs midnight struggle with God in the Old Testament, Jesus Christs miraculous life and death in the
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Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton UP, 1973.

New Testament, the murder and resurrection of Osiris in Egyptian mythology, and Peles celestial dismemberment and reintegration in traditional Hawaiian lore, to name a few. What I found fascinating in my research was how accurately a modern military service members experience of preparation, deployment, tour of duty, end of tour, and return to society fit into the Heros Journey cycle of Call to Adventure, Initiation, Threshold of Adventure, ReInitiation, and New Identity. The similarity of experiences was close but not perfect. At the "end of tour" and "return to society" points in a service members deployment (the Re-Initiation and New Identity points of the Heros Journey), many service members interviewed for afterdeployment.org acknowledged experiencing a lack of adequate reintegration support from the military, the media, their community, and society in general. Some of those who had been wounded during deployment were finding reintegration especially difficult; the tumultuous process of returning from a combat zone to civilian society can be stressful for any service member, but wounded soldiers spoke of feeling as though they had to justify their "woundedness" with the robust, indestructible image of the conquering Hero that most of us are familiar with. This led to the first step in the development of my doctoral thesis as I realized how interesting it would be to compare the familiar theory of the Heros Journey, where the hero triumphantly returns from his or her adventure with a "boon" that benefits the entire society, with the unexplored concept of the Wounded Heros Journey, in which the hero must face his or her community bearing what appear to be unattractive, undesirable scars from the adventure. At this point I would like to make a clarification: when I talk about post-deployment "wounding" I am referring to all kinds of injuries: physical (as in shrapnel wounds, amputations and Traumatic Brain Injuries) and mental/emotional/spiritual scarring such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), depression, and nightmare-induced insomnia. The next stage in the development of my dissertation topic came from the happy fact that I was eventually asked to write for the Parenting and Physical Injuries modules of afterdeployment.org as well. As I delved deeper into research on military children and the challenges faced by wounded service members and their families after military deployment, the final "puzzle piece" of my doctoral study became clear; I could apply a "mythic sensibility" to the Wounded Heros Journey by creating puppet shows for military children featuring myths of the Wounded Hero. Through puppetry, a rich and expressive art form with a long and dynamic history across many cultures, I realized that myths of the Wounded Hero could be "brought to life" for children, and provide an accessible language and landscape for families to communicate about post-deployment adjustment and parental reintegration. I have a great deal of experience creating psycho-educational puppet performances for children and communities

that have experienced trauma, and this idea was a perfect fit with my desire to research the relationships between mythology, artistic manifestation, and healing. It is my contention that facing the deep emotional and spiritual scars of trauma through art can create a paradigm shift in perception, opening new (and potentially healing) perspectives within the human imagination. According to Gilbert J. Rose, psychoanalyst and author of numerous books on neuroscience and aesthetics, "Art does not communicate meanings as much as it generates them in the receptive mind. [] The more it urges the mind beyond experience, the more it opens up the realm of the possible, a balanced and free play of knowledge and imagination" that can have an associated flow of tension and release only limited by the mind of the beholder. In other words, artistic manifestation can stimulate empathic insight, offer a progressive reintegration of feeling, thought, and perception, and "result in a new perspective of external reality through the imaginative eye of new understanding."2 My preferred expressive art form is puppetry; puppet productions include the fine arts of painting and sculpture, architectural stage design, fabric arts, woodworking, script writing, choreography, and much more. Puppetry in rituals, education, artistic expression and entertainment has flourished around the world for at least three thousand years. IIt is my experienced opinion that puppetry allows for a visceral relationship with a performance because the viewer is watching a symbolic self-representation that is three-dimensional; it is a communicative modality that speaks, interacts, and "lives" in a way that much two-dimensional art does not. Tina Bicat, renowned puppet artist and performer, explains the uniquely expressive power of puppetry in this way: The transformation of the tiny stage occurs in the minds of the audience; the often jaded imagination of the habitual theatre-goer is startled back to the excitement and involvement of the things that first made them love theatre. They are prompted to flesh out the wooden bodies of the performers with all the character inherent in the role and become silent actors themselves by virtue of their involvement with the puppets onstage.3 Puppetry, therefore, is an art form that stimulates human imagination, innovation, and ingenuity due to the amazing variety of ways one can animate an inanimate object for aesthetic, emotional, psychological, and spiritual expression. Because of this, audience members become intimately involved with every aspect of the performance, infusing the subject matter of the show

Rose, Gilbert J. "Affect: A Biological Basis of Art." American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 21:501-512, 1993. 3 Bicat, Tina. Puppets and Performing Objects: A Practical Guide. Crowood Press, 2008.
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with resonance and intensity. This is one reason puppetry has remained my preferred expressive art form for almost 20 years. The final step in the process of my doctoral project was to successfully combine my research on post-deployment familial reintegration, the Wounded Hero archetype in myths from around the world, and the expressive power of puppetry to demonstrate my conviction that these seemingly disparate subjects can and do work in tandem to inspire and encourage military families who are welcoming home a traumatized service member. In order to bring multicultural mythic representations of the Wounded Hero archetype "to life," so to speak, I created a puppet production titled Heros Welcome that will be offered to military families, support groups and Veterans hospitals starting January 2011. Heros Welcome consists of two stories, an ancient Norse myth called "Tyrs Hand" and a Korean folktale titled "The Tigers Whisker," each told by a modern-day storyteller puppet named Mr. Whitney. The challenges faced by the children of wounded military service members, such as the loss of a sense of normalcy; anger and sadness towards the injured parent; an increased sense of fear and distrust; and problems communicating thoughts and feelings can make a parents return from deployment fraught with tension and misunderstanding. Heros Welcome does not attempt to tell children or parents how they should feel or what they should do to "get better." My intention with the production is to open the imagination of military families to the universality of seemingly personal and isolating experiences, suggesting a new, mythically-inspired lens through which to view their challenging circumstances. In this way I hope to give back to the military families in my community and my nation for the many sacrifices they have suffered in the name of duty and honor to their country. While I do not always support the reasons for war, I strive to support the warrior who risked life and limb on my behalf. Many of us missed opportunities to support veteran family members from WWII, Korea and Vietnam immediately upon their return from deployment. I hope its not too late for us or for them to find peace and reconciliation. But if I can have even a small part in helping historys latest wounded heroes and their families readjust to civilian life after combat, Heros Welcome will have resulted in far more than a doctoral degree and potential future career path. It will offer me the opportunity to find the language to finally welcome home the heroes in my own life. NOTE: The presentation will end with a 2-minute clip from Heros Welcome after this explanation/introduction: Yun Oks husband has returned from three years of fighting in the wars an embittered, angry young man. In order to find a cure for her husbands affliction, Yun Ok consults with an

old hermit-on-the-mountain for a healing potion she can give her husband. The hermit tells her to get the whisker off of a live tiger for the potion. It takes months and months of gentle patience for Yun Ok to get the wild beast to trust her enough for her to take one of his whiskers, but she finally succeeds in her nearly-impossible task without being eaten alive. At the end of the scene with Yun Ok you will also see the last scene of the show, in which the storyteller, Mr. Whitney, asks the kids how they feel after listening to the two myths.