Marie-Louise von Franz, The Mother: Archetypal Image in Fairy Tales
Introduction
There are a variety of approaches to fairy talesanthropological, literary, educational and so onbut to a psychologist the important question is, what can fairy tales tell us about the human psyche?
The psychologist assumes that the images and motifs in fairy tales conceal a meaning not immediately obvious.
This book uses the findings of Jungian psychology to unearth that meaning.
In approaching fairy tales we must first take into account the kind of people whose imaginations produced them.
Those who created the traditional folk tales were mostly simple people living close to nature.
The stories are not a result of conscious construction, but emerged spontaneously and then grew to their present form through countless repetitions by many tellers.
So the themes they deal with are universal rather than individual, and the language used to express them is composed of symbolic images typical of the unconscious.
The fact that fairy tales originate deep in the
unconscious and strike a universal chord does not,
however, mean that they are easy to understand. They
do not give up their secrets easily.
The reason is not hard to find: the people who dreamed them up, in their
closeness to nature, possessed a completely different mentality from today’s average adult
A fairy tale is an unconscious product of the imagination, just like a dream.
The difference is that it is not the creation of a single mind but of many,
possibly of a whole people.
In other words it cannot refer to the problems of one individual only, and so has a much more universal character than most dreams.
In interpreting a dream, an analyst is dealing with a particular individual’s problems, knowing that the unconscious is providing a solution in the dream.
Fairy tales, products of a number of people’s imaginations, are the dreams of the whole of humanity and contain solutions to humanity’s problems.
They raise the curtain on the drama of the soul and the characters in them are present in everyone’s psyche.
Whoever seeks the meaning of these stories is of course also a human being, and so solutions to personal problems too can be found in themnot the trivial everyday sort, but the deeper concerns everyone shares.
Fairy tales are evidence of a wealth of spiritual life which on the whole is no longer directly available to us.
In psychological terms it is the path to the unconscious which must be rediscovered.
The analysis of fairy tales, like that of dreams, is an attempt to build a bridge to the unconscious, to the treasure-house of interior imagery.
For many people, images they no longer understand have no significance. Since, however, a more or less inexhaustible fund of knowledge is
hidden within them, they have lost something of great value, certainly something worth attempting to reach.
From Jung we have learned that the unconscious is not only a place where repressed memories have been stored.
His investigations into the human soul brought him to an understanding that everything new is a product of the unconscious, the inexhaustible source of psychic and spiritual life.
This distinguishes Jungian psychology.
It produces an attitude of mind which is always prepared to reckon with the unconscious as a living agent, for good or evil.
All the characters in fairy talesgood fairies, dragons, witches and dwarfsare archetypal images present at the deepest level of the psyche.
Whether or not we are aware of them they have their effect, since they are
psychological realities. Jungian interpretation does not explain them away; it uses them to find a path to the inner experience symbolized by the fairy tales’ imagery.
The events in fairy tales portray a vital psychological reality. If we understand them, we gain a new understanding of ourselves.
If we cut ourselves off from this world of images, we are separated from one
of the main sources of our own life energy.
Deep down in the unconscious of human beings there is a treasure-house of knowledge, or common spiritual experience, which can enrich us if we gain access to it.
Jung termed this level of the psyche the collective unconscious, home of the archetypes.
The analysis of fairy tales is one way of dealing with unconscious.
It is an attempt to connect them with consciousness.
In order to satisfy the needs of the conscious intellect and its abstractions, an image expressed in a fairy tale must be presented in psychological terms.
The abstract concept may say a lot less than the image, which is usually a lot more beautiful too, but for anyone who no longer understands the image it can act as a bridge to a more immediate comprehension.
In the sense we are using the term, interpretation means trying to point out the astonishingly profound and striking messages hidden beneath the surface by making comparisons with similar stories, with myths,
religious ideas and dreams.
Pointing out really means pointing to something modern individuals often fail to see.
Nowadays we live mostly in the top storey of our psychological house, or, to put it another way, we have been cut off from our roots, from our own substrata.
Fairy tales present a view of the ground plan of the psyche.
So they are saying what everyone basically knows, something completely straightforward.
“In that case,” some may wonder, “why do we need to interpret them at all?”
Perhaps because it is precisely the straightforward we can no longer see, having lost our way in the world of consciousness.
Some believe that a simple fairy tale cannot possibly have anything to do with serious problems, and that interpretations read too much into them.
I see interpretation as a kind of translation, however.
The more carefully one translates, the more amazing are the things one discovers. And why not?
The natural scientist with careful work also finds processes in nature that are the result of a previously unsuspected intelligence which, perhaps, exceeds his or her own.
Is this surprising? Why shouldn’t there be an intelligence somewhere outside ourselves greater than that of our consciousness? And why shouldn’t we seek to obtain the wisdom of the unconscious?
We do exactly the same when we interpret dreams.
We have, perhaps, a patient whose problem we simply cannot understand,
until we carefully analyze the dreams.
Often they show clearly what is wrong.
Partly what we hear in fairy tales is the voice of a very primitive mentality, from a time when everything in the psyche was projected onto nature.
Trees and animals had voices and expressed humanity’s own unconscious
thoughts and feelings.
We can still observe this state of mind very well by studying primitive religions.
But the primitive is still alive in each of us, a part of our psyche with which most of us have lost contact.
If it were merely an inferior part, we would not suffer by the loss. But such is not the case.
A single night’s dream can be enough to make us understand how helpful the advice of this voice from the unconscious can be.
Being in contact with this side of ourselves can prevent us from becoming neurotic, for it is a source of vitality and creativity.
That is why understanding anew the mentality of that part of the psychethe natural man, as it wereis so important.
It is different in that it does not speak in abstractions.
It speaks to us in images and symbols.
Nor does it live in our world of conscious opposites.
For instance our concepts of time, our ”today” and “tomorrow,” play a far less absolute role at that level than they do for us consciously.
It exists in relative terms outside time.
It also knows there are miracles and expresses that knowledge in fairy tales.
All this is difficult for our modern, scientific ways of thinking to comprehend.
It does not seem sensible.
Of course we should not simply give up these valuable habits of ours and revert to a primitive mentality.
I must strongly emphasize that.
A lot of people believe they can integrate their unconscious by capitulating to it.
Our task is rather to recognize, while maintaining our conscious position, that there is quite a different way of looking at life, and that it is not only still alive in fairy tales but in ourselves too.
That is the only attitude which has any chance of reconciling the two points of view.
One example of the alien quality of the primitive way of thinking is the apparent lack of differentiation between subject and object.
With the help of a developed understanding we have more or less learned
to separate interior from exterior, and indeed learning to do this is necessary if we do not want to remain children for ever.
What connects the primitive with a contemporary, more conscious, integrated person is that both are aware of the living contents of the soul.
The primitive is still aware, whereas the wise person is one who has regained this knowledge, and so knows it in a more conscious way.
Humanity’s basically positive intellectual development involved a loss, which now we must compensate for.
We have learned to differentiate between inner and outer reality, it is true.
We are no longer as naive as primitive people who, on going into the forest and seeing a devil, take it as objective reality and appear not to know that they have had a vision.
If we are even capable of having visions, we usually efface the knowledge because we know that it is not external reality.
But that means we have also lost access to the autonomous processes of the mind and its deeper contents.
We lack true introspection. And that is a great loss.
It has caused a psychological split, a separation from the deeper layers of our psyche, leaving us isolated within the ego.
Primitives possessed direct access to the unconscious, and put all the mysteries and terrors they saw into the images of fairy tales.
These represent the inner drama of the soul, which we mistakenly try to reduce to something external.
It is very important to be aware of this danger when interpreting fairy stories.
Only if we look within, toward the reality of the unconscious, can we understand the deeper sense of fairy tales and find our own wholeness. ~Marie-Louise von Franz, The Mother : Archetypal Image in Fairy Tales, Page 9-12
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