When I reflect on my life I am, in some ways, surprised that it has all come together in the way that it has and acquired, as a philosopher once put it, the nature of a well-plotted novel.

For the first six years of my adult working life I was a police officer. It was a profoundly formative experience for me and one that I’m grateful for having had. Ultimately though, law enforcement was not a career I could sustain in the long term, so I returned to college, majored in psychology and literature, and after a few years of working as a probation officer, went to graduate school and studied psychology at the master’s and doctoral level. I worked for the next 30 years as a psychotherapist, mostly in private practice. Along the way, I also earned a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies. Sometime in the very early 1990’s I saw the Bill Moyers interviews with Joseph Campbell on PBS, and knew immediately that the study of myth encapsulated everything I was passionate about in my intellectual life: psychology, literature, imagination, the study of symbols, even the exploration of existential concerns.

Now I’ve reached a point in my life and career where I want to focus more exclusively on understanding and examining life through the lens of myth. What I am doing now is not psychotherapy, but for many people, myth provides solutions to the problems of living—particularly those ineffable, enigmatic, bewildering aspect of life—that traditional religion, psychology, and psychiatry have difficulty drawing near to. Myth embraces paradox, irony, image, and inner psychic facts in ways that more conventional techniques avoid, and helps us understand what it is, and what it means to be, human. Myth focuses on the commonality, the universality of our shared human experience, even when that experience may occasionally verge on the bizarre or the horrific (what Gershom Scholem called “the terrors that myth is made of”). Myth embraces all of that, in fact it emerges out of all of that, and declares that nothing human is alien to me.

Myth, and its close cousin, poetry, provides tremendous beauty and consolation, a balm to human suffering, which is, I believe, one reason it has remained central to cultures everywhere. But when Myth is understood literally, when it’s taken as fact, myth has the potential to add to the suffering and cruelty of the world.

I am very fortunate, all these years after first hearing Joseph Campbell talk about the Power of Myth, to be working for the Joseph Campbell Foundation. I am honored to be the Publications Director at JCF and look after the collected works of Joseph Campbell and other JCF publications, as well as being the MythBlast Series Editor and the host of the foundation’s flagship podcast, Pathways With Joseph Campbell.