Interviews

Maureen Murdock, PhD is a psychotherapist, writing teacher and the author of eight books, including The Heroine's Journey:Woman's Quest for Wholeness, a ground-breaking book which revealed a broader understanding of the female psyche on both a personal and cultural level. Murdock is also the author of Unreliable Truth, The Heroine's Journey Workbook; Fathers' Daughters; Spinning Inward: Using Guided Imagery with Children and is the editor of an anthology of memoirs written by her writing students entitled Monday Morning Memoirs: Women in the Second Half of Life. Her new book, Mythmaking: Self-Discovery and the Timeless Art of Memoir, will be published by Shambhala March 5, 2024.

The following interviews with Maureen give an in-depth view of her work.

An Interview with Maureen About Her New Book

Join Maureen Murdock as she discusses her forthcoming book, MythMaking, with Karin Gutman, writer, story coach, and founder of Spirit of Story. 


The Stages of the Heroine's Journey

An interview with Maria Souza of womeandmythology.com
May 24, 2023

Maria offers a 10-week-long course focused on the wisdom provided by the stages in The Heroine’s Journey. She has participants from all over the world and the following questions were submitted by women in her women’s circle from Shanghai, China, Russia, France, India, Brail, Mexico, Colombia, Croatia, Egypt, Peru, Argentina, Australia, Kazakhstan, UK, Malta and the Netherlands. We talked about fear; the contribution of the women’s movement to the Illusory Boon of Success; the mother-daughter relationship; identifying the inner masculine; successful women’s leaders; and dualism.

Download the transcript of the interview here.


The Heroine's Journey, a Follow Your Blissters Podcast

An interview with Will Gethin
August 17, 2022

In this Follow Your Blissters Podcast, Will Gethin interviews Maureen Murdock, a Jungian psychotherapist, photographer and author of the ground-breaking bestseller The Heroine’s Journey and other books, whose work explores the mysteries of the psyche, a fascination with mythology and a love of storytelling and memoir writing. In this episode, Maureen introduces her heroine’s journey model, which she created to better represent the psycho-spiritual development of women she felt was overlooked by Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey framework.  She also explores her own lived experience of traveling through the 10 stages of The Heroine’s Journey, including her mythic journey of descent to the underworld.

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On Memoir, with Maureen Murdock

An Interview with Bonnie Bright, Ph.D. for Pacifica Gradaute Institute

Some of the best memoirs you can read are those that are reflective, those which are informed by dreams, myth, and synchronicities, maintains Maureen Murdock, a Jungian-oriented psychotherapist and the author of multiple memoirs and books about memoirs. In other words, there’s a depth psychological perspective that can facilitate, enhance, and deepen the telling of one’s story in a profound way.

Murdock is co-leading a 9-month certificate program on writing memoir at Pacifica Graduate Institute with Dr. Jennifer Selig. Her new book, Mythmaking: Self-Discovery and the Timeless Art of Memoir, will be published by Shambhala March 5, 2024 In a recent interview, Maureen was asked to expound on what it takes to produce a good memoir.

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Memory and Myth

An Interview in Story Circle Journal: LifeWriters Talk About LifeWriting

The guest presenter at our April 2005 LifeLines Retreat, Maureen Murdock is a psychotherapist, creative writing teacher, and a many-times published author....In our interview, Maureen Murdock talked to me about her recent book and about the role of myth in our life story.

Story Circle Journal: Your book, Unreliable Truth, is part memoir and part essay about the meaning of memoir and the craft of memoir writing. When you started the book, did you set out intending to write it in this way? How did it evolve into the final blend of memoir and essay?

Maureen Murdock: The book actually began as an essay about the similarities between myth and memoir. I had been teaching myth, literature and religious studies for five years at Pacifica Graduate Institute and began to see a parallel between myth and memoir in terms of how we humans try to make meaning out of our lives. Both genres address the basic questions mythology poses: Who am I? Where am I going? Who/what is my tribe? Why am I here?

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Emotional Truth

An interview with Maureen Murdock by B. Lynn Goodwin
June 2004 www.WriterAdvice.com

When Maureen Murdock shares her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, she describes the memories captured in Unreliable Truth. Her book, subtitled On Memoir and Memory, grew beyond the story of her mother’s battles into a guide for writers. It shows that memoir is neither a photograph nor a biography, but an individual’s unique “angle of perception.”

Memoir blends personal perceptions and universal truth. “The secret is to tell your particular life story so that it adds to our collective understanding of what it is to be human,” according to Murdock. In the first section of Unreliable Truth, “To the Best of My Recollection,” she mixes memory and reflection, showing the process she uses to tell her stories.

In the second section, “On Writing Memoir,” Murdock offers tools, techniques, and writing suggestions. I tried some of them when I took her memoir-writing class, and I strongly recommend them. Below she shares her experience and advice.

LG: Tell us about yourself. What is your background? When/how did you discover memoirs and decide to write in that genre?

MM: I have been a psychotherapist for 22 years and I teach creative writing as well as depth psychology in graduate school. Growing up Irish American, I have always been interested in how people tell the stories of their lives and what they choose to tell. The story we tell about ourselves becomes the story we live. I certainly saw that in my father's life. He's a great story teller and he believes the stories he tells about himself and they come true!

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Maureen Murdock Interviewed by Mary Davis

Published in C.G. Jung Society of Atlanta Quarterly News, Summer 2005

Women are standing, lining the walls, spilling over into the hallway — all of us hungering to learn about ourselves, about the meaning of our life journeys as we gather to listen to Maureen Murdock’s lecture, “The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness,” at last year’s Mythic Journeys’ Conference in Atlanta. We are not disappointed; we hear an inspiring discussion of the ways our journeys as women, as heroines, are both important and different from men’s journeys. Maureen Murdock is first of all, a very wise woman who articulates the issues facing us as individuals and as a culture. She is also a family therapist who was licensed in 1982, and she is an educational consultant. Murdock was Core Faculty and past Chair of the M.A. Counseling Psychology Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and she currently teaches in the Depth Psychology Program at Sonoma State University.

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