This is Joseph Campbell's best known work.  George Lucas admits to returning to this work over and over again. In this book Campell seeks to identify the Monomyth, the One Story that is told in all of the world's stories and religions. He builds on Carl Jung's psychology and sees myths and dreams as coming from the same psychic source, the human subconscious. In some sense, myths are just public dreams. “It is not difficult for the modern intellectual to concede that the symbolism of mythology has a psychological significance. Particularly after the work of the psychoanalysts, there can be little doubt, either that myths are of the nature of dream, or that dreams are symptomatic of the dynamics of the psyche ... With their discovery that the patterns and logic of fairy tale and myth correspond to those of dream, the long discredited chimeras of archaic man have returned dramatically to the foreground of modern consciousness. According to this view it appears that through the wonder tales—which pretend to describe the lives of legendary heroes, the powers of the divinities of nature, the spirits of the dead, and the totem ancestors of the group—symbolic expression is given to the unconscious desires, fears, and tensions that underlie the conscious patterns of human behavior. Mythology, in other words, is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology" (219). So, while he does not believe any of these stories (including Christianity) to be true in any historical sense, he does believe they are "myths to live by" (the title of another work by Campbell). According to him, we are all acting out our own hero's journey. "In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dream. The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change" (2). This work is highly recommended to any student of writing, literature, Story, or myth