Maureen Murdock's "The Heroine's Journey: A Woman's Journey Towards Self-Actualization"

Jen Grisanti: I loved the spiritual approach to the writing. I identified with so much of what Maureen Murdock explores. She takes a deep dive into the life process and the masculine and feminine energies that are in all of us.

I would recommend this book to anyone who want to have an in depth look at arc of growth for the heroine. If you are a writer, it will help you to implement the heroine’s worldview. This book will benefit anyone who reads it because we all can identify with the feminine and masculine perspective. It also makes you understand the familial dynamic through a more compassionate lens.

I gave it five stars because of the tremendous insights it offers and the way that it made me feel.

United States on Aug 16, 2023

Paulette: The hero`s journey is well known. Used for structuring stories for ages and also for therapeutic purposes. But it lacks the female perspective, it mainly takes into focus the male hero.
Today it is even more important than ever to emphasize the integration of the female. Women still work in a world, developed by men for male purposes. It does not take into account getting pregnant and the joy of having a family. This joy needs to be negated in order to be able to work in this world as before. Still, women in this age group hit their heads hard at the glass ceiling. And many of us realise it just decades later. The book points simply at the underlying mechanisms of the denial of the female part. It is a great read, though the integration of Greek mythology would not have been necessary and slows the pace.

Germany on Mar 07, 2023

emma marshall: Genuinely one of the most pivotal books as a woman on her journey back to self that I’ve ever read. I’m very familiar with The Hero’s Journey, but the way that that concept has been turned into one for the feminine to make sense of, to find new teachings, to even find validation for all of the moments that appear in this journey, especially when things are tough - it’s been the life jacket I’ve been searching for at this very moment in time. Thank you for writing this. It will stay with me forever and I’ll come back to it no doubt time and time again.

United Kingdom on Dec 10, 2021

Angie Wilkins: So much is wrote about the heros journey that as woman we a bought up to believe that the only path available to us is up and out into the world. Not only do we have to be prove our mantle in wold of career opportunities created for men to excel in.The pressure is on us to find motherhood both fulfilling and an ultimate success. Anything less is a complete failure on our part. and our daughters look to us break a cycle that has ingrained itself into our society and belief system for thousands of years. A tall order I know! Yet hear we are in the 21st century, struggling to be all things to all people and being constantly made awear of a shortcomings. The Heroines journey has been a game changer in the way I express and value my femininity instead of treating it like an enemy that holds me back from living. I now understand that it has a wisdom of it's own that brings the human condition into a compassion embrace.It doesn't devide and conquer, it incorporates our masculine aspects and enriches our lives. We are the healers, poets, nurtures, intuitives, and the conduits that bring spirit into being through our womb...that kind of strength and magic should never be underestimated. It...

United Kingdom on Sep 18, 2021

Lynne Shapiro: Tries to be a parallel to Joseph Campbell's Myths of the Hero's Journey also going into different cultural mythologies to do so. However, it is based on talks with a limited number of therapy patients and tends to be about women's inner find themselves through analysis journeys-- about their female and male side, identities with their Moms and their place in patriarchy and the like. So if you want to read about women having journeys like men's--like going off on a horse or in a car to new places with different kinds of motives and experiences, this book is different than that.

United States on Jan 21, 2021

David Dunbar: A fascinating Jungian analysis of what it means to be a woman. The Heroine's Journey is a counterweight to the patriarchal bias of Western society which privileges male experience. Murdock has to reach back to pre-Christian mythology and beyond the confines of Western society to illustrate the archetypal nature of women's experiences and to lay bare the dysfunctional 'to hell in a handcart' direction of a society that not only ignores but disdains the Feminine as a valid and balancing social and psychological force. This book should not be read necessarily as a gender-focused tract. We all contain a mixture of the Masculine and the Feminine. As a man, I was easily able to identify with the sometimes toxic effects our patriarchal society has on the individual. I have suffered too. I enjoyed this book immensely and appreciated the insights it provided. If we are to heal the world, we need urgently to adopt Feminine values more widely and more deeply.

United Kingdom on Nov 03, 2017

L D Tanner: One of the reasons that I read, "The Heroine's Journey," by Maureen Murdock is there is a void on what stages a women must take to reach fulfillment. Based on the rich symbolism of mythology, Joseph Campbell created the hero's journey that many authors have adopted to use as a model in their stories. Although mythology is rich with stories about women, the feminine aspects of intuition, nurturing, and creativity have been downplayed in our modern society. Success is primarily measured in terms of masculine attributes.

Maureen Murdock, working as a therapist, created the steps in a heroine's journey to help women integrate both their masculine and feminine sides. One of the quotes that I love from the book is, "The heroine must become a spiritual warrior." Only when a woman can merge both her masculine and feminine aspects of herself will she reach fulfillment. That is when a woman not only serves the needs of others but can value and be responsive to her own needs as well. This is definitely a book worth reading. It is thought-provoking and can be used by storytellers whose main protagonist is a female.

United States on Feb 12, 2017

JL: I am currently writing a book with a female protagonist and read "The Heroine's Journey" to aid me with character building. I assumed it would be the female version of Joseph Cambell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" and the beautifully structured "The Writer's Journey".... both of which discuss the hero (masculine) journey and I have already aligned my plot and archetypes to these.

Turns out, The Heroine's Journey was written by a therapist and even though it DOES relatively parallel the hero's journey as well as go over how radically different the journey is for a female, it is written more for the modern woman and her journey through her own life. Seriously... I had to hold back tears through the first quarter as I realized how much of my childhood experiences with my mother(s) and father(s) and our culture has shaped me.

Then it went on showing me how my masculine journey to gain my CPA by working full time, going to grad school full time, and have a long distance relationship would inevitably lead to mental and physical burnout (which it did) as I tried to numb my pain with alcohol, anti-depressants, and sleeping pills so I could just get through this s***....

United States on Aug 14, 2015

Author Serena Jade: In Patriarchal Relationships, there is always a dominate and submissive.-Excerpt from The Heroine's Journey-Maureen Murdock touches upon the enormous task of going down into the abyss to transform into wholeness.

The hero's journey has been told throughout history that the hero's father is absent from the hero's life. The same sex parent has the most influence in a child's life.

In the heroine's journey, the mother figure is the most important. However, there is not that much written about the heroine's journey. All we have are tales of Cinderella, Snow White and they are dealing with stepmothers and sisters. As a society, we don't want to accept there are mothers and sisters who are just as cruel. In real life, the women who endure such cruelty become the caretakers for their elderly parents and who in society have been labeled; Old Maids. But, we are living in the twenty-first century and the caretakers can overcome their fate by an enormous amount of self-knowledge! Then they can use their positive father role model and be effective in the world...the servant becomes the heroine!

Of course, this process takes years of uncovering shame and doubt. The "Good...

United States on Feb 17, 2015

Finn Jackson: This book contains real wisdom and practical insights.

We are all (or nearly all) damaged. The 'masculine' and 'feminine' parts of ourselves have been split and labelled 'better' and 'worse' than each other. We can see the results in our society (which as a man I would say still teaches us unconsciously that boys are better than girls, or vice versa, that killing is better than talking, ...). And we can see it in our trashing of the environment (which as I write this in early 2011 is beginning to impact us more, through the storms in Australia and the USA, and even (I would argue) Fukushima...).

I am a man and I found this book one of the best, deepest, and most accurate and applicable psychology books I have read.

There is real insight here.

The Heroine's Journey is a journey of true healing, in a way that I believe the Hero's Journey is not.

If just a fraction of the people on the planet could experience it, the world would be transformed.

United Kingdom on May 01, 2011