Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales
People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients.
They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody who is not worth so much attention, and so on.
There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated
dynamism to the wrong situation.
One can ask them why they exaggerate, why it is so important, but the over-importance or overemphasis is not made consciously.
The charge goes into their personal foolishnesses because a part of the dynamic center is not parked or not in connection with the right motivation.
The moment these people devote themselves to what is really
important, the whole overcharge flows in the right direction, ceasing to heat up things not worth so much emotional attention.
Repressed creativity is one of the most frequent reasons for such an attitude, but repression of the religious function in the psyche often results in this tendency to one-sided exaggeration as well.
The religious function is probably the strongest drive in the human psyche.
If it is not directed toward its natural goal, it loads up the other areas of life and gives them an unmerited emotionality.
Laurens van der Post points this out in Journey into Russia, where he shows that because the religious function of the psyche is mutilated by an atheistic ruling system, this exaggeration is sometimes applied most ridiculously: in certain
country regions the peasants have made electricity their god and will call their boy “Voltage” and the girl “Electra.”
They talk about new dams, or currents, or dynamos which have been built with the same awe with which in former times they would have
spoken of religious matters.
He also describes a pathetic scene he observed when visiting Lenin’s mausoleum.
He was quite struck by this rather badly embalmed little bourgeois of the nineteenth century, lying there with his neatly cut beard and
having sometimes to be re-embalmed because the worms still ate him.
He saw some simple country folk come in, a Russian peasant and his daughter.
The man looked in a rather stunned way at this corpse in the glass coffin and took off his cap.
Presently he gave a pious look to his daughter, intimating that they should go.
After making the sign of the cross, they went quietly out again. If there is no God, we make one out of a dead man! ~Marie-Louise Von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, Page 259-260
