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Finding Success in Failure
- Bradley Olson, PhD
- Sep 14
- 7 min read
Before we get to my MythBlast for the week, I want to draw your attention to our new Joseph Campbell Essentials Series. The first two volumes—Joseph Campbell on Bliss and Joseph Campbell on The Hero’s Journey—launch a collection of beautifully designed pocket gift books that bring together Campbell’s most inspiring reflections. In these pages, the world-renowned mythologist illuminates the mystical joy of following one’s passion and the universal path of adventure, transformation, and return. Portable and elegant, these little volumes are perfect for carrying everywhere, savoring as bedside reading, or giving as meaningful gifts—an invitation to live fully and courageously. These little books make a big impression; they are indispensable, beautiful, and for those who value sage wisdom for living, truly essential.
In honor of our Joseph Campbell Essentials book series, and since our highlighted text this month is Joseph Campbell’s classic The Hero With A Thousand Faces, it might be interesting to look at this business of heroing and perhaps think a little about some of the tacit difficulties of this subject; it’s not all parades and laurels. All heroism flirts with failure. Death, refusal of the return, an unsuccessful quest—these are not exceptions to the heroic journey but its constant companions. Joseph Campbell, in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, shows us that what looks like failure from one angle is often from another, the very unfolding of destiny.
it’s not all parades and laurels. All heroism flirts with failure.
The hero, from Campbell’s perspective, seeks not the gods, but what they represent. This is the key to understanding Campbell: the understanding that, in his conception of myth, the two worlds—divine and human—are really one world. Discovering the transcendent reality that runs beneath the material world re-enchants and re-ensouls it, and the hero revels in that discovery.
The challenges of the journey
There are, however, two points of extreme difficulty in Campbell's Heroic Journey: the first lies in separating from the ordinary world, and the second in returning from the strange, new one. Leaving the comfort of the familiar and predictable—the very domesticity the ego clings to—is accomplished either willingly or unwillingly. As the saying goes, fate leads the willing and drags the unwilling. And once the hero achieves separation, obstacles and tests are met, the strange new world of adventure begins to reveal itself as a kind of transcendent paradise.
The transcendent reality has become the hero’s reality—Utopia. But the roots of the word utopos mean “no place.” Like enlightenment itself, utopia is not a condition that living, breathing humans can inhabit indefinitely. Those heroes who remain in that utopia are by definition failed heroes and no longer human; they must either have died or undergone a kind of apotheosis, shedding the mortal husk and taking on the radiance of a god.
To leave behind the bliss of profound growth, wisdom, and skill that the strange new world has granted is to face the necessity of return, to fall back into the familiar world. That fall should not be considered a failure but instead, a fortunate fall, a felix lapsus, the achievement of a deeper understanding and acceptance of mortal life in which one is more fully and profoundly human. Odysseus’ greatness lies not in his wanderings but in his homecoming; Gilgamesh returns to Uruk with a deeper vision of humanity and the value of a mortal life; Psyche endures her trials and reenters the world transfigured by love. To fall back is to pick up once more the weight of time and limitation, yet carry within oneself the seed of what was seen beyond it. And return one must, for without the hero doing so, the journey is incomplete.
Essentially, only the human being can act heroically, for the hero’s task is never to become a god, but to bring what the gods symbolize back into human life. Yet we humans envy the gods—their immortality, their power. But the gods, in turn, seem to envy us. They fall in love with humans (if not love, at least lust), they weave suffering into our lives, Aeschylus says, so we may suffer our way into truth.
And the truth, as Horace reminds us, is that we are only dust and shadow, pulvis et umbra sumus, and only we mortals know despair, only we mortals strive to overcome, and in that striving our mortal natures discover beauty, meaning, and gratitude—emotions known only vicariously to the gods, for those gifts bloom only in the humus of mortal flesh. To be human is to fall and to rise again, and in that cycle, not in an unbroken ascent, the fullness of life reveals itself.
Understanding failure
From this perspective, we may be tempted to look at the failure of the hero—whether by death, refusal of the return, or an unsuccessful quest—as a defeat, as something lamentable or worthless. Yet failure is not only inevitable but, I believe, essential to life, especially to the heroic life. To recognize this, however, one must see past the corporeal to the soulful. That task is difficult, and as Virginia Woolf observed: “With the hook of life still in us still we must wriggle. Left to ourselves we speculate thus carnally. We need the poets to imagine for us.” That poetic imagination is precisely what myth offers—the poetry of the unconscious, which reveals failure not as an end, but as the garden in which achievement grows. For every success is itself a form of failure; desire always exceeds what can be attained. In this sense, we do not triumph over failure—we fail our way into success. In The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell writes:
As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep - as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny. (42)
I have to wonder if the “opening to destiny” that blunder creates explains why the hero may unconsciously be in love with failure. There is something all too final about success, something finite, relegated to the lifelessness of history. Success really only lives in the past, while the pain of failure and its L'esprit d'escalier, thoughts about what we might have done differently, always remain with us. Myths never tire of illustrating the point that failure in this journey is only apparent, that it is not what it seems. What from one perspective appears to be crushing defeat and violent death is from another perspective a willing sacrifice. The myths do not deny the agony (in the Greek sense of the word, which means struggle) of existence but rather see through it to the essential peace and harmony of the universe.
Finally, as Campbell wrote in Hero, “It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse” (337). And I would add that each of us, in our own private struggles, our imperfections, sallies forth in the image of the hero—not in our victories, but in the silences of our failures, in our determination to live humanely in an often inhumane world—armed with imperfect skills and the longing to make gentle the life of this world.
Thanks for reading.
MythBlast authored by:
Bradley Olson, PhD is an author, speaker, and a psychotherapist. He serves as the Publications Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and the host of JCF's flagship podcast, Pathways With Joseph Campbell. Dr. Olson holds a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Dr. OIson is also a depth psychologist in private practice in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has lived since 1995. Dr. Olson has graduate degrees in psychology from the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Olson offers mythic life coaching at What's Mything in Your Life (bradleyolsonphd.com)
This MythBlast was inspired by The Hero With a Thousand Faces and the archetype of The Magician.
Latest Podcast
In this episode of The Podcast with a Thousand Faces, we’re joined by Dr. Stephen Larsen, psychologist, mythologist, author, and longtime student and friend of Joseph Campbell. Together with his wife Robin, Stephen co-authored Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind, the definitive biography of Campbell. As close personal friends of Campbell for over two decades, the Larsens were uniquely positioned to offer an intimate, multidimensional portrait of the man behind the myths. Their book, written with exclusive access to Campbell’s journals, papers, and inner circle, brings both the public and private facets of his life vividly to light. Stephen served on the founding board of the Joseph Campbell Foundation and co-founded the Center for Symbolic Studies, where he has spent decades exploring the intersection of myth, psychology, and human transformation. Trained by Edward Whitmont, Stanislav Grof, and Campbell himself, Stephen has also been a pioneering figure in the field of neurofeedback and consciousness research. In this conversation with JCF’s John Bucher, Stephen reflects on his relationship with Campbell, the writing of A Fire in the Mind, and why mythology still matters—perhaps more than ever—in a world aching for meaning.
This Week's Highlights
"What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, and the fulfillment or the fiasco. There’s always the possibility of a fiasco.
But there’s also the possibility of bliss."
-- Joseph Campbell
Pathways to Bliss, 135