My new article on the Doctor and the hero archetype will be the
topic of a lecture at the University of Arts London in a course on Doctor Who.
To the untrained eye, it may not seem like wildly popular British cultural phenomenon Doctor Who draws on advanced psychological and complex literary theories and is simply a show about time travel and scary aliens and bug-eyed monsters. But one reason it has the right to call itself the longest-running Science Fiction program in television history, is because it transcends cultural lines. The Doctor is not just the Last of the Time Lords, he is a hero. Truly, at the heart of it, he is the very definition of a hero. Carl Jung, a Swiss pioneer in Psychiatry, first devised a system through which he could categorize everyone in the world into nine different categories, which he called ‘archetypes,’ the best known of these being the hero archetype. Joseph Campbell, an American author, later built upon Jung’s theory in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Dr. Bryan M. Davis made a nine-part amalgamation of their numerous criteria in his work at Stephen F. Austin University. The Doctor fills all of the nine criteria of being a hero and that is why so many are transfixed with his story.
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