The Path of The Wounded Hero - Becoming Homo Amor
A new course at Parallax Academy with Dr. Marc Gafni; A podcast with Dr. Marc and Andrew Sweeny
Course begins Sunday, September 28th, 2025
Note: edited for readablity and essence
Dr. Marc: I don’t think we have any chance of engaging the metacrisis without understanding our relationship to woundology. I don’t think we have any chance of getting through the day, creating love, creating life, creating decency, integrity, joy, if wound is not at the center of everything.
Andrew: It seems to me the true hero is always wounded. That’s the paradox. We talk a lot about trauma, but in a very psychological way, not in a deep spiritual or religious way. I’m really excited to hear you speak on this—one of the most perennial subjects.
Dr. Marc: So, we’re going to enter into the world of the wound. If we bypass that world, or enter it from the wrong angle, we get suicide, anxiety, depression—clinical and non-clinical. We get meanness. We get evil. Evil comes in the wound. And let me say it plainly: the world is filled with evil. That’s important to recognize.
Of course, the world is also filled with good. Those who have studied with me know I’m excited to be alive, grateful every day, moved and dazzled by the beauty of the world. And yet the world is filled with evil.
At the very core, the essence of the metacrisis is that evil people with a great desire for leadership, for power and centrality, rise to the top as apex predators. The world, in some sense, is controlled by 10,000 evil people. That’s an exaggeration, but not inaccurate.
So where does evil come from? Two sources. First, the pleasure of evil—an pseudo-erotic pleasure, unaddressed. Sauron is having a good time in The Lord of the Rings, in his own twisted way. But the more common form is evil that comes from the untransformed wound. Evil comes in the wound.
So that’s one of our topics: how we engage evil, how we confront the lurking moments of evil within us, and how we face evil in the metacrisis. It has everything to do with how we understand wounding.
I was speaking with my dear friend Layman Pascal. The subject of evil and wounding came up. And I said to him: sometimes a Nazi is just a Nazi, not shamanically interesting. There’s actually evil in the world. It’s not all symbolically fascinating. Evil might begin with the wound, but it devolves into evil.
The place we can inhibit evil is by engaging the wound differently. Because we’re all wounded, we either become the wounded villain or the wounded hero. My demonic self or my heroic self. My unique self.
Andrew: So we’ve got to pick sides? We’re both, right? We have both in us. It’s not one or the other, but there are key moments where you make a choice.
Dr. Marc: Exactly. At a certain point, we step into a particular path or vector. Those points of divergence are deeply connected to wounding. How I engage my wound is who I am.
Andrew: When I look at the array of world leaders—their body language, their presence—I see intelligence, but something missing. Some dimension of humanity seems absent.
Dr. Marc: And here’s the second thing we’re saying: evil comes in the wound. The divergence between unique self and demon always occurs at the nexus point, at the synapse, in how I engage my wound.
And when people rise to positions of extreme power, it’s often because of one of two things: either their wound festers and becomes perverse and evil, or they find pleasure in anti-value, in evil itself. Often those two come together.
Andrew: When I look at people in power and the world situation, the only solution I can see is a deep spiritual or religious dive. Policy alone isn’t enough. It’s too complex. It feels like getting to the source of things—which you find in the Fisher King wound and in those mythologies.
Dr. Marc: Exactly. The Fisher King is central. That myth is a retelling of Jacob wrestling in the darkness. But let’s bracket that.
We need to engage policy, yes. But we can only engage it through a powerful sense of being a hero. When we’re wounded, we step away from heroism—either into ordinariness because we feel we don’t deserve to be a hero, or into villainy because we cover the wound with pseudo-eros that becomes anti-eros.
The alternative path is to become wounded heroes. Not just wounded healers—that’s more of a personal, psychoanalytic frame. We need something larger. The wounded hero engages the wound, transforms it into wonder.
To be unique self, to be Homo Amore, the new human, is to realize ontologically: I am the universe, a love story in person. The amorous cosmos in person. And Homo Amore must be a wounded hero. The hero feels the whole. The hero sacrifices for the sake of the whole.
But the hero is not Superman. He’s the wounded, stumbling hero. That’s why the Marvel universe resonates—it’s about wounded heroes.
So the question is: what’s the process by which I don’t become demonic, but become daimonic? How do I become a wounded hero?
Andrew: You mentioned Joseph Campbell and the monomyth. I was thinking of Lord of the Rings—leaving the familiar world, finding your band of friends, discovering your adversaries, tutelage from a wise wizard. There’s a pattern: the wounding, the dying, the resurrection. So how does that relate to what you’re talking about?
Dr. Marc: Campbell understood—as does the Jacob story in Genesis—that the hero goes on a quest, is challenged, and is wounded. The question is: how does the hero turn the wound into heroism?
In ancient mythologies, this was clear. You had gods and goddesses alive in the world, a field of value, a story of value, a vision of self, a vision of the next world. All of that has been denuded from culture. So now wounds devolve into malaise, breakdown, depression. We’ve lost the capacity to alchemically transform the wound into heroism.
So first, we need to reclaim the hero. The hero is an early adopter of Homo Amore. And we need to understand uniqueness—not just shadow, but unique wound.
It’s not just that I’m wounded. I have a unique wound. That’s not the same as my unique shadow. My shadow is my pathology, the way I act out my wound. My unique wound is the particular hurt I carry.
For one person, it’s: I feel disrespected. For another: I’m not alluring. For another: I’m too much. Those are completely different wounds.
And I can’t become my unique self, the hero of my life and of the whole, unless I engage that unique wound.
Andrew: So it’s more than shadow integration.
Dr. Marc: Yes. Wound and shadow are distinct. Shadow is pathology. Wound is heartbreak.
Because we don’t have a language for heartbreak, we translate it into trauma. We turn the tremor of heartbreak into the terror of trauma. That’s a mistake. Heartbreak is one of the most magnificent experiences of being alive.
The essential act of divine creativity is when the Infinite Intimate—the name we use for God in Cosmoerotic Humanism—initiates creation. And divinity can only create through being wounded.
Andrew: I was thinking of Job.
Dr. Marc: Even before Job, there’s a wounded God. Reality is created by a wounded God. That was the great realization of the Solomon lineage and Lurianic Kabbalah in the Renaissance. The world is not created by a heroic God alone, but by a God who contracts, steps back, and in that contraction is wounded. Creation emerges from the space of divine wounding.
Andrew: So is it our heroic task to heal God?
Dr. Marc: That’s the question. How does the wounded hero become the wounded healer of the wounded God?
We’re too glib with language. People casually say, “I am God,” but if we don’t tremble in ecstasy and terror when we say “the wounded God,” we don’t know what we’re saying. What does it mean, in my body, to be a wounded hero called to heal the wounded God?
In the Fisher King myth, Parsifal is supposed to ask: do you serve the Grail? He fails. Can the Fisher King become the wounded hero who becomes the wounded healer of the wounded God? That’s the depth of the myth.
And this is crucial: am I traumatized, or am I heartbroken? We’ve lost that distinction.
Andrew: Heartbreak is openness. Trauma is contraction.
Dr. Marc: Exactly. If I stay with the emotion, heartbreak opens me. If I arrest the feeling, it poisons into trauma.
Therapy tries to deal with wounds, but therapy has no adequate language. Jung tried, and Hillman, his student, did deep work, but unevenly. He mixed psychoanalysis with postmodern nihilism. Helpful for the 60s–90s, but insufficient now.
We need a new story of value—Cosmoerotic Humanism—a world religion as a context for our diversity, and a new vision of the hero: the wounded hero.
Andrew: Hillman and others were pioneers, but they hadn’t yet reached the turnaround we need now—back towards what used to be called religion.
Dr. Marc: Yes. Not premodern religion. Not the old story. But a new synergy. Religion as the only path that can ground my capacity to turn wound into wonder.
We can’t do it with therapy. We can’t do it with old religion. We need something new.
Andrew: One word we haven’t used yet is love. Often wounds come from feeling unloved, rejected, cast out of Eden. Isn’t that the crux?
Dr. Marc: The word “love” is one of my least favorite words in the English language; it’s overused and misunderstood. That’s why I prefer “outrageous love,” “evolutionary love,” and eros. But you’re right: the essence of wounds is relational. We feel unloved, unseen, insulted, violated.
But here’s the key: all wounds are insults we fail to transform into wounds of love. That’s precise.
Think of a small misunderstanding—someone feels unseen or disrespected. That exchange can devolve into armor, cycles of anger, demonization. Or, if shared vulnerably—“this is how I felt”—it can become alchemy. The paradox: after the wound is lived and exchanged, we love each other more than before. The wound becomes the opening to deeper trust.
The great loves of our life are not those who never wound us, but those with whom we continually alchemize the wound into love.
That’s where trust is born. We trust we can walk through the wound together. That’s where the body relaxes, the heart opens. That’s the beginning of the heroic path.
Andrew: That’s heroic.
Dr. Marc: That’s heroic.