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Before Emmett Early established a private practice as a clinical psychologist, he worked for many years at the Vets Center in Seattle, doing individual and group therapy with Vietnam Veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While working with these traumatized veterans, Early experienced stressful counter-transference reactions, often defined in the trauma therapy literature as secondary PTSD (the patient or, via projective identification, the therapist, re-experiences the patient's traumatic complex during his verbal recall of the original trauma). This reminded Early of his personal experience of Jungian analysis, where he had worked on the psychological trauma he had suffered as a child, resulting from the death of his mother when he was 7 and from being raised by an alcoholic father. Interestingly, in the Introduction to this book, Early focuses on the loss of his mother as ‘the most significant event in my life’, but makes no further mention of his relationship with his alcoholic father. He compares the traumatic feelings of rejection and alienation that the Vietnam veterans experienced on return to the US to his own experience of being ‘an emotionally neglected motherless child’.
In the early chapters of the book he outlines how Jung's theory of the complex helps us understand psychological trauma and amplifies his outline with mythological warrior hero stories, both ancient and modern, notably the Celtic Arthurian legend of Gawain and the Green Knight, and the adventures of the TV and radio hero, the Lone Ranger. The culture hero is commonly a survivor of childhood trauma who in adulthood seeks to transcend past wounds by overcoming fear and danger in combat against enemies of the culture. This resembles the repetition compulsion common in those adults who seek to remember and work through past trauma by reliving and re-experiencing traumatic situations in the present. Ideally the hero's experiences differ from those of most male survivor