Heroic Growth

04/13/2026

04/13/2026

Superhero comics are not just stories about good and evil. They’re systems that hold tension.

A recent article argues that even when superhero comics critique policing, they ultimately reinforce it. That’s a strong claim—and there’s truth in it. But it also misses something essential about how the medium works.

Superhero comics don’t resolve contradiction. They sustain it.
Since Umberto Eco, we’ve understood that these stories exist in a kind of ongoing present. Change happens, but nothing fully closes.

That means critique doesn’t just disappear—it stays in circulation.
And readers aren’t passive. As Henry Jenkins shows, people actively interpret and reshape meaning. What a story “says” and what a reader takes from it are not always the same thing.

That’s where comics get interesting.

They can reinforce systems—and at the same time expose their cracks.
Full write-up on LinkedIn.


Thomas Coghlan

Thomas E. Coghlan, PsyD Superhero comics are not reducible to copaganda.

04/11/2026

Continuing Heroic Growth's Iconic Issues series, Iconic Issues #3, Batman #404, Year One, Part I.
Every cop has heard it, and most have said some version of it at some point in their career: “Something’s wrong.”

In police work, that realization doesn’t come all at once. It builds. It shows up in the job itself, in the way things are done, in what gets tolerated, in what gets ignored. And once you see it, you don’t really get to unsee it. The question becomes what you do next.

That’s where Batman #404 hits harder than most people realize.

Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli open Year One by putting Jim Gordon and Bruce Wayne into Gotham at the same moment. This isn’t a coincidence or just parallel storytelling. It’s structural. Both men encounter the same city, the same corruption, the same institutional breakdown. Gordon walks into a police department already compromised. Wayne walks into a city where crime is not just present but embedded.

From there, the book does something very precise. It splits them.

Gordon stays inside. Wayne steps outside.

Gordon tries to fix the system. Wayne tries to do what the system can’t.

What makes this issue iconic is that neither path is treated as more “right.” Gordon isn’t naive. He sees exactly what he’s dealing with and chooses to confront it anyway. He pushes back, he applies pressure, and at times he uses fear to draw lines where none exist. Wayne, on the other hand, tries to operate as himself first and fails. That failure matters. Batman is not his first move. It’s what comes after he realizes the system isn’t built to hold what he’s trying to do. The symbol becomes necessary.

You see it clearly in the early sequence where Bruce attempts to intervene without the mask and gets beaten nearly to death. You see it in Gordon’s arrival, where corruption isn’t hidden, it’s normalized. You see it in the famous moment when the bat crashes through the window, not as inspiration in a vacuum, but as a response to failure, fear, and the need to become something that can actually function in that environment.

Both men come to the same conclusion. The difference is where they stand when they act on it.

For anyone who has worked the job, that split feels familiar. Some stay and try to push the system back into alignment. Others stop believing the system can do what it claims and start operating in ways that are more independent, more controlled, sometimes more rigid. Both positions come from the same place. Both are attempts to restore order where it’s breaking down.

From a clinical perspective, that matters. When an officer says the job isn’t what they thought it would be, or that the system doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, that isn’t just frustration. It’s a shift in how they are organizing themselves in relation to the work. Some move toward engagement and reform. Others move toward control and distance. Neither is random. Both are structured responses to the same pressure.

Batman #404 endures because it doesn’t romanticize that process. It shows two men shaped by the same environment, making different but equally necessary adaptations. Gordon and Wayne are not opposites. They are two ways of answering the same problem.

They both start in the same place. They just take different paths once they realize what they’re up against.

Thomas Coghlan, Blue Line Psychological Services, PLLC

04/06/2026

Most officers have either said or heard some version of the same thing: “I don’t know what happened. It just flipped.” What is striking is not the intensity of the reaction, but how quickly it occurs. One moment everything is handled and under control, and the next it is not.
This is often described as anger, but that description is incomplete. In The Incredible Hulk, Bruce Banner does not gradually lose his temper. He loses the ability to hold what he is feeling, and when that happens, something else takes over immediately.

The same pattern shows up in policing because the job requires holding experiences that are not always processed in the moment. When those experiences accumulate without being thought through, they do not disappear. They emerge later, often without warning.

The goal is not to eliminate anger. It is to create enough space to recognize what is building before it turns into action. That space is what allows control to remain in place.

Heroic Growth Thomas E. Coghlan, PsyD “A complex is a psychic fragment which has split off owing to traumatic influences or certain incompatible tendencies… it leads a relatively autonomous existence.

04/02/2026

There is a particular kind of break that occurs not because the role becomes too heavy, but because the institution no longer holds what the role is supposed to represent.

That is the moment Captain America #176 captures with unusual clarity.

Steve Rogers does not step away because he is overwhelmed. He steps away because he comes to a realization: the system he has been serving no longer reflects the values he believed he was defending. The problem is not his capacity to continue. It is the loss of alignment between what the institution claims to stand for and what it actually enacts.

This is not burnout.

This is institutional betrayal.

In the superhero form, these moments are not incidental. They are structural. The genre persists by staging tensions that cannot be resolved, only carried or confronted. Captain America #176 is not simply a story about a hero abandoning an identity. It is a representation of what happens when symbolic authority and institutional authority separate, and the individual is left to decide which one remains legitimate.

That decision has consequences.

From the outside, it looks like someone walking away.

From the inside, it is a break in trust.

In policing, this distinction matters. Officers do not only leave because the work becomes too much. They also leave when the institution is experienced as no longer aligned with the principles that justified their commitment to it in the first place.

When that happens, the issue is not endurance.

It is legitimacy.

And once legitimacy is in question, the relationship between the individual and the institution is no longer stable in the same way.

Sometimes in this job, people make the same move for very different reasons.

They walk away.

But not always for the same reason Steve Rogers does.

03/29/2026

At certain points in law enforcement, the structure becomes visible; Iconic Issues examines these moments through the lens of modern myth.

There are inflection points in policing where the path divides and the question of walking away from the job becomes real. In Heroic Growth at Blue Line Psychological Services, PLLC, officers often consider these iconic moments.

In this series, Iconic Issues, Heroic Growth examines such moments through archetypal events as they appear in modern mythology. This first entry considers a familiar but rarely articulated tension: the experience of standing at the threshold of leaving the work.

There is a moment in this work that is often misunderstood by people who have never done it. It is not simply burnout in the usual sense, nor is it reducible to stress or fatigue. It is the point at which a person begins to seriously consider putting the job down—walking away, retiring early, or finding some other way of living that does not carry the same weight. This consideration does not arise because the work cannot be done, but because it becomes increasingly difficult to determine what the work is doing to the person who carries it.

In The Amazing Spider-Man #50, Peter Parker makes precisely this decision. He removes the suit and discards it, and for a brief moment the act appears to produce relief. The burden seems to have been set aside. What follows, however, makes clear that the weight he carries was never located entirely in the suit itself.

This is the point at which the story aligns with the experience of the job. The uniform can be taken off, the shift can end, and the physical markers of the role can be set aside, but the underlying structure does not disengage so easily. Responsibility does not terminate at the boundary of the workday, and identity does not separate cleanly from role when the role has made sustained demands on the person who occupies it.

The question, then, is not simply whether one should remain in the position or leave it. The more difficult question concerns what portion of the experience belongs to the job and what portion has become part of the self. For some, leaving produces a sense of clarity. For others, it introduces a different kind of uncertainty that is harder to articulate. There are also those who remain, not because the work has become easier, but because they begin to recognize a distinction between being consumed by the role and carrying it with awareness.

This is not an argument in favor of staying, nor is it an argument in favor of leaving. It is an attempt to name the tension accurately. When the structure of the experience becomes visible, it can be related to differently, even if it is not resolved.

He put it down, but it did not put him down.

Thomas Coghlan

03/27/2026

“I must bear all that I have done and not done.” — Carl Jung, The Red Book
Spider-Man is often understood as a figure of responsibility. What is less often recognized is that responsibility, in his case, does not function as a value—it becomes structure.
A moment of inaction followed by loss does not simply resolve into meaning. It persists. It organizes. What begins as an ethical realization becomes something that operates continuously, extending beyond what has occurred into what might occur. What is possible becomes something to carry.
“Everyone knows nowadays that people ‘have complexes.’ What is not so well known… is that complexes can have us.” — Jung, CW 8
This is not simply burden. It is a way the psyche organizes around unintegrated experience.
The article below explores Spider-Man not as a character to interpret, but as a structure to observe—how responsibility, once fused with identity, no longer recedes.
The question is not whether he is responsible.
It is whether responsibility can ever be put down once it has become part of who he is.
👇 Article below

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/comics-contemporary-myth-consulting-room-i-spider-man-responsibility-w5wue
Thomas Coghlan

With great intensity of affect comes great autonomy of the complex. ~ Heroic Growth “The problem of the hero is to find and face the truth of himself.

03/20/2026

Thor was not always worthy - Continuing Heroic Growth's Comic Therapy Series with Donald Blake.

In Journey into Mystery #83, Donald Blake is introduced not as a disguise, but as a limitation—a physically impaired, modest physician through whom Thor’s power can only be accessed by transformation. From the beginning, the structure is clear: power is mediated through constraint.

That structure becomes explicit in Journey into Mystery #99– #100. Odin binds Thor to Blake, removes his memory of godhood, and forces him to live as a mortal. Not as metaphor—as condition. Thor must learn humility by being Blake.

In Journey into Mystery #103, the purpose is revealed: Blake exists so Thor can experience vulnerability, develop compassion, and relinquish arrogance. Blake is not an alter ego. He is an imposed structure—a corrective.

And as Thor expands into something more cosmic in Thor #159– #169, that structure begins to strain. The more inflated Thor becomes, the less Blake fits.

That tension isn’t just myth.

In policing, there is a moment that looks structurally similar—when an officer has their firearm removed.

It may be for discipline. It may be for fitness-for-duty. It may be both. But the structure is consistent:

Authority → Removal → Status Change → Adjudication → Restoration (or not)

The weapon is taken. The officer is placed on modified or restricted duty. They still report to work—but no longer function in the role that defined them.

And the meaning, whether stated or not, is clear: “We do not currently trust you to exercise force.”

Even when framed as non-disciplinary, it is experienced as something deeper: “I’ve been deemed unsafe.”

This is the Blake position. Not failure. Not collapse. A structural imposition.
Still present. Still recognized. But constrained.
Neither fully inside the role, nor outside it.
In the comics, Blake was imposed so that power would not separate from limitation.
In the real world, officers are sometimes placed into that same structure—suddenly, involuntarily—when authority is removed and identity is put under pressure.
The question is not simply how quickly someone returns.
The question is whether the limitation is endured… or integrated.
Because Blake was never just the man before the god.
He was the condition placed on the god so that power would not become something else entirely.

03/19/2026

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/comics-contemporary-myth-consulting-room-heroic-growth-9uz6e

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life… I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.” — Joseph Campbell For those working in law enforcement, this may feel familiar: You can do everything right—and still feel like the villain in your own story.

03/17/2026

Some battles are not fought against enemies, but between parts of the self.
Moon Knight—Marc Spector in the Marvel universe—is a hero defined by that internal struggle.
Marc Spector is often portrayed as a man divided between identities: soldier, mercenary, vigilante, and the different personas he constructs to navigate the worlds he inhabits.
In depth psychology, fragmentation of identity is not simply pathology. It can also be a signal that the psyche has been forced to organize itself around experiences that could not be carried within a single, stable structure of self.
Carl Jung once wrote, “In each of us there is another whom we do not know.”
For Moon Knight, that “other” appears as alternate identities—Steven Grant, Jake Lockley—and as the looming archetypal presence of Khonshu, the Egyptian moon god who claims him as his instrument.
Whether interpreted mythologically or psychologically, the story dramatizes an important psychological truth: when powerful psychic forces are not consciously integrated, they often appear to us as something outside ourselves.
Jung described this phenomenon directly:
“The gods have become our diseases.”
In the consulting room, Moon Knight’s struggle becomes less about defeating enemies and more about something quieter and more difficult—learning to recognize, differentiate, and integrate the forces that have taken hold of his psyche.
The therapeutic task is not to eliminate these forces.
It is to make them conscious enough that they no longer possess the person who carries them.
This is why Moon Knight’s story resonates with many people who live and work under sustained psychological pressure—including police officers.
Law enforcement professionals often operate in environments where identity must fragment in order to function. The protector, the investigator, the warrior, the public servant, the parent at home—each role demands a different psychological stance. Over time, those roles can become compartmentalized in ways that resemble the divided structures dramatized in characters like Moon Knight.
Therapy in this context is not about weakening the officer.
It is about helping the individual reconnect the parts of the self that operational environments require them to separate.
Like Moon Knight’s analysis, police psychotherapy is often less about “fixing symptoms” and more about restoring dialogue within the psyche itself.
When that dialogue returns, the forces that once appeared overwhelming or alien begin to reorganize into something more stable.
Not a perfectly unified self.
But a self capable of holding the tension of its own contradictions.
The question is rarely whether the divided parts exist.
The question is whether we are willing to meet them.
Blue Line Psychological Services, PLLC

03/14/2026

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states nor between classes, but right through every human heart.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

When Solzhenitsyn wrote this line, he was describing something deeper than politics or history. He was pointing to a psychological truth: the fundamental struggle between creation and destruction, conscience and domination, does not exist primarily in systems or ideologies. It exists within the human psyche itself.

This image attempts to capture that interior tension.

The face is not divided into two different people. It is one face held between two symbolic worlds. On one side stands the seductive architecture of power—control, force, the promise that suffering can be eliminated if authority becomes absolute. The dark side does not merely represent evil; it represents the psychological temptation toward inflation: the belief that through domination, certainty, and force one can finally overcome vulnerability.

On the other side stands a different orientation entirely. The temple, the ascent, the open sky evoke a quieter but more difficult path: restraint, contemplation, fidelity to vocation rather than conquest. This side does not promise power over the world. Instead it asks something harder—discipline, humility, and the willingness to carry responsibility without the illusion of total control.

What makes the image psychologically interesting is that neither world fully consumes the face. The two environments meet within a single center. The dark eye suggests the pull of power and the archetypal energy that accompanies it. The other eye remains human, watchful, grounded. The image therefore does not portray a completed transformation but a tension that must continually be negotiated.

Depth psychology often speaks about the “tension of opposites.” Growth does not come from eliminating one side of the psyche, but from holding conflicting forces consciously without allowing either to dominate completely. The destructive potential within the self cannot simply be denied; it must be recognized and integrated without surrendering to it. Likewise, conscience must remain active enough to resist the intoxicating promise of total power.

The question the image poses is therefore not which world exists. Both clearly do. The question is which principle becomes sovereign within the individual: domination or conscience, inflation or responsibility, power for its own sake or fidelity to something higher than the self.

Solzhenitsyn’s insight reminds us that the decisive arena of that struggle is not the battlefield or the political stage.

It is the human heart.

03/14/2026