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  THE INTERPRETATION OF FAIRY TALES

  REVISED EDITION

  Marie-Louise von Franz

  SHAMBHALA

  Boulder

  2017

  Shambhala Publications, Inc.

  4720 Walnut Street

  Boulder, Colorado 80301

  www.shambhala.com

  © 1970, 1973, 1996 by Marie-Louise von Franz

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Franz, Marie-Louise von, 1915–

  The interpretation of fairy tales / Marie-Louise von Franz.—

  Rev. ed., 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A C. G. Jung Foundation book”—

  Rev. ed. of: An introduction to the interpretation of fairy tales. 1987 printing, © 1970.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

  eISBN 9780834840843

  ISBN 9780877735267 (alk. paper)

  1. Fairy tales—History and criticism. 2. Psychoanalysis and folklore. I. Franz, Marie-Louise von, 1915– Introduction to the interpretation of fairy tales. II. Title.

  GR550.F714 1996 95-25815

  398′.09—dc20 CIP

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  1. Theories of Fairy Tales

  2. Fairy Tales, Myths, and Other Archetypal Stories

  3. A Method of Psychological Interpretation

  4. A Tale Interpreted: “The Three Feathers”

  5. “The Three Feathers” Continued

  6. “The Three Feathers” Completed

  7. Shadow, Anima, and Animus in Fairy Tales

  Notes

  Index

  E-mail Sign-Up

  PREFACE

  This book resulted from lectures which I gave in English at the C. G. Jung Institute more than twenty years ago. Based upon a recording of the lectures, it was first published in English in 1970.

  In these lectures, I summarized for the students the experience I had gained through my contributions of interpretation to the work of Hedwig von Beit in Symbolik des Märchens. Apart from some early studies from the Freudian school, as well as some short essays by Alfons Maeder, Franz Riklin, and Wilhelm Laiblin, no interpretations of fairy tales had been published by Jungian authors at that time. That is why it was my primary intention to open up the archetypal dimension of fairy tales to the students. For this reason, the ethnological and folkloristic aspects are only touched upon, which is not meant to imply, however, that I view them as unimportant.

  Since then, there has been a real blossoming of fairy tale interpretation from the standpoint of depth psychology. From the Freudian school, primarily Bruno Bettelheim’s book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales should be mentioned. From the Jungian school, so many books have been published that I cannot name them all here. Although it is not my intention to assail colleagues by name, I would nevertheless like to express a very personal opinion here. In many so-called Jungian attempts at interpretation, one can see a regression to a very personalistic approach. The interpreters judge the hero or heroine to be a normal human ego and his misfortunes to be an image of his neurosis. Because it is natural for a person listening to a fairy tale to identify with the main character, this kind of interpretation is understandable. But such interpreters ignore what Max Lüthi found to be essential for magical fairy tales, namely, that in contrast to the heroes of adventurous sagas, the heroes or heroines of fairy tales are abstractions—that is, in our language, archetypes. Therefore, their fates are not neurotic complications, but rather are expressions of the difficulties and dangers given to us by nature. In a personalistic interpretation, the very healing element of an archetypal narrative is nullified.

  For example, the hero-child is nearly always abandoned in fairy tales. If one then interprets his fate as the neurosis of an abandoned child, one ascribes it to the neurotic family novel of our time. If, however, one leaves it embedded within its archetypal context, then it takes on a much deeper meaning, namely that the new God of our time is always to be found in the ignored and deeply unconscious corner of the psyche (the birth of Christ in a stable). If an individual has got to suffer a neurosis as a result of being an abandoned child, he or she is called upon to turn toward the abandoned God within but not to identify with his suffering.

  Hans Giehrl, in Volksmärchen und Tiefenpsychologie, makes what I view to be a partially justified reproach of depth-psychology interpreters, namely that they transfer their own subjective problems onto the fairy tales, where they are not to be found at all. As in all scientific work, the subjective factor can never be entirely excluded. But I believe that by using the basic tool of mythological amplification, one can hold in check such subjectivism and, to some extent, thereby reach a generally valid interpretation.

  Another tool we can use to reach a certain level of objectivity is to take the context into consideration. Here, too, Giehrl expresses criticism, though in this respect I do not agree with him. He believes that because variations sometimes include contrary motifs and for this reason are omitted, the objectivity of contextual research is impaired. But if one goes into this more deeply, then one can see that each contrary motif changes the whole context and therefore proves just the opposite. The Russian fairytale “Beautiful Vassilissa” tells the story of a girl’s encounter with an ancient witch, which ends on a positive note. The German version, “Frau Trude,” ends on a negative note. If one scrutinizes both versions, then one sees that the girl in the Russian version is kind and obedient and has good common sense, whereas her counterpart in the German version is disobedient, impertinent, and cheeky. This permeates the whole context, and because of this, one cannot interpret both fairy tales in the same way, despite the fact that both stories circle around the same archetype of an encounter with the Great Mother.

  In what follows, my efforts are aimed at interpreting only a few classical stories, or basic types of important fairy tale plots, as it were, in order to help clarify for the reader the Jungian method of interpretation, a method which I believe to be well substantiated. If, as a result, some readers feel motivated to try their hand at interpretation and have fun doing so, then the goal of this book will have been achieved.

  MARIE-LOUISE VON FRANZ

  Küsnacht, Switzerland

  April 1995

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to thank the many people who helped to see this seminar into print: Una Thomas for her faithful transcript, on which the text is based; Marian Bayes and Andrea Dykes for their help with my English; and Tha
yer Greene for helping to finance the original publication. I would also like to thank Patricia Berry and Valerie Donleavy for the first form in which this seminar appeared.

  I also want to thank Mrs. Alison Kappes for translating the additions made in the German version for this new revised English edition. My greatest gratitude goes to Dr. Vivienne Mackrell for helping me to organize this book but mainly for her general support.

  1

  THEORIES OF FAIRY TALES

  Fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes. Therefore their value for the scientific investigation of the unconscious exceeds that of all other material. They represent the archetypes in their simplest, barest, and most concise form. In this pure form, the archetypal images afford us the best clues to the understanding of the processes going on in the collective psyche. In myths or legends, or any other more elaborate mythological material, we get at the basic patterns of the human psyche through an overlay of cultural material. But in fairy tales there is much less specific conscious cultural material, and therefore they mirror the basic patterns of the psyche more clearly.

  In terms of Jung’s concept, every archetype is in its essence an unknown psychic factor, and therefore there is no possibility of translating its content into intellectual terms. The best we can do is to circumscribe it on the basis of our own psychological experience and from comparative studies, bringing up into light, as it were, the whole net of associations in which the archetypal images are enmeshed. The fairy tale itself is its own best explanation; that is, its meaning is contained in the totality of its motifs connected by the thread of the story. The unconscious is, metaphorically speaking, in the same position as one who has had an original vision or experience and wishes to share it. Since it is an event that has never been conceptually formulated, he is at a loss for means of expression. When a person is in that position he makes several attempts to convey the thing and tries to evoke, by intuitive appeal and analogy to familiar material, some response in his listeners, and never tires of expounding his vision until he feels they have some sense of the content. In the same way we can put forward the hypothesis that every fairy tale is a relatively closed system compounding one essential psychological meaning, which is expressed in a series of symbolic pictures and events and is discoverable in these.

  After working for many years in this field, I have come to the conclusion that all fairy tales endeavor to describe one and the same psychic fact, but a fact so complex and far-reaching and so difficult for us to realize in all its different aspects that hundreds of tales and thousands of repetitions with a musician’s variations are needed until this unknown fact is delivered into consciousness; and even then the theme is not exhausted. This unknown fact is what Jung calls the Self, which is the psychic totality of an individual and also, paradoxically, the regulating center of the collective unconscious. Every individual and every nation has its own modes of experiencing this psychic reality.

  Different fairy tales give average pictures of different phases of this experience. They sometimes dwell more on the beginning stages, which deal with the experience of the shadow and give only a short sketch of what comes later. Other tales emphasize the experience of animus and anima and of the father and mother images behind them and gloss over the preceding shadow problem and what follows. Others emphasize the motif of the inaccessible or unobtainable treasure and the central experiences. There is no difference of value between these tales, because in the archetypal world there are no gradations of value, for the reason that every archetype is in its essence only one aspect of the collective unconscious, as well as always representing also the whole collective unconscious.

  Every archetype is a relatively closed energetic system, the energetic stream of which runs through all aspects of the collective unconscious. An archetypal image is not to be thought of as merely a static image, for it is always at the same time a complete typical process including other images in a specific way. An archetype is a specific psychic impulse, producing its effect like a single ray of radiation, and at the same time a whole magnetic field expanding in all directions. Thus the stream of psychic energy of a “system,” an archetype, actually runs through all other archetypes as well. Therefore, although we have to recognize the indefinable vagueness of an archetypal image, we must discipline ourselves to chisel sharp outlines which throw the different aspects into bold relief. We must get as close as possible to the specific, determinate, “just so” character of each image and try to express the very specific character of the psychic situation which is contained in it.

  Before I try to explain the specific Jungian form of interpretation, I will briefly go into the history of the science of fairy tales and into the theories of the different schools and their literature. We read in Plato’s writings that old women told their children symbolic stories—mythoi. Even then fairy tales were connected with the education of children. In later antiquity Apuleius, a philosopher and writer of the second century, built into his famous novel The Golden Ass a fairy tale called “Amor and Psyche,” a type of “Beauty and the Beast” story.1 This fairy tale runs on the same pattern as those one can nowadays still collect in Norway, Sweden, Russia, and many other countries. It has therefore been concluded that at least this type of fairy tale (that of a woman redeeming an animal lover) has existed for two thousand years, practically unaltered. But we have even older information, because fairy tales have also been found in Egyptian papyri and stelai, one of the most famous being that of the two brothers Anup (Anubis) and Bata. It runs absolutely parallel to the two brother-type tales, which one can still collect in all European countries. We have written tradition for three thousand years, and what is striking is that the basic motifs have not changed much. Furthermore, according to Father Max Schmidt’s theory, Der Ursprung der Gottesidee, we have information to the effect that certain themes of tales go as far back as twenty-five thousand years before Christ, practically unaltered.2

  Until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fairy tales were—as they still are in remote primitive centers of civilization—told to adults as well as to children. In Europe they used to be the chief form of wintertime entertainment. In agricultural populations, telling fairy tales became a kind of essential, spiritual occupation. Sometimes it is said that fairy tales represent the philosophy of the spinning wheel (Rockenphilosophie).

  Scientific interest in them began in the eighteenth century with Winckelmann, Hamann, and J. G. Herder. Others, like K. Ph. Moritz, gave these tales a poetical interpretation. Herder said that such tales contained the remnants of an old, long-buried faith expressed in symbols. In that thought one sees an emotional impulse—the neopaganism which began to stir in Germany as early as the time of Herder’s philosophy and which appeared in a very unpleasant way not long ago. Dissatisfaction with Christian teaching and the first longings for a more vital, earthy, and instinctual wisdom began then; later we find it more explicitly among the Romanticists in Germany.

  It was this religious search for something which seemed lacking in official Christian teaching that first induced the famous brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm to collect folktales. Before then, fairy tales suffered the same fate as the unconscious itself, which was taken for granted. People take it for granted and live on it, but do not want to admit its existence. They make use of it—for instance, in magic and talismans. If you have a good dream, you exploit it, but at the same time you do not take it seriously. For such people a fairy tale or a dream does not need to be looked at accurately but may be distorted; since it is not “scientific” material, one can just as well spin a little around it, and one has the right to pick what suits one and to discard the rest.

  That same strange unreliable, unscientific, and dishonest attitude has for a long time prevailed toward fairy tales. So I always tell students to look up the original. You can still get editions of the Grimm fairy tales in which some scenes have been omitted and those from other fairy tales inser
ted. The editor or translator is sometimes impertinent enough to distort the story without taking the trouble to make a footnote. They would not dare do that with the Gilgamesh epic or a text of that kind, but fairy tales seem to provide a free hunting ground where some feel free to take any liberty.

  The Brothers Grimm wrote down fairy tales literally, as told by people in their surroundings, but even they could sometimes not resist mixing a few versions, though in a tactful way. They were honest enough to mention it in footnotes or in their letters to Achim von Arnim. But even the Grimms did not yet have that scientific attitude, which modern folklore writers and ethnologists try to have, of taking down a story literally and leaving the holes and paradoxes in it, dreamlike and paradoxical as they may sound.

  The collection of fairy tales which the Brothers Grimm published was a tremendous success. There must have been a strong unconscious emotional interest, for like a mushroom growth other editions popped up everywhere. In France, the much older edition of Perrault was revised. In every country people began to make a basic collection of their national fairy tales. At once everybody was struck by the enormous number of recurrent themes. The same theme, in thousands of variations, came up again and again in French, Russian, Finnish, and Italian collections. With this came again Herder’s first emotional interest in the search for the remains of an “old wisdom” or “faith.” The Brothers Grimm, for instance, used such similes as “a broken crystal whose fragments you still find scattered in the grass.”

  Parallel to the Brothers Grimm, the so-called symbolic school, whose main representatives are Chr. C. Heyne, F. Creuzer, and J. G. Görres, came into existence. Their basic idea was that myths were the symbolic expression of deep philosophical realizations and thoughts, and were a mystical teaching of some of the deepest truths about God and the world.3 Though these investigators had some interesting ideas, their explanations now seem to us too speculative. Then came a more historical and scientific interest, an attempt to answer the question why there were so many recurring motifs. Since at this time there was no hypothesis about a common collective unconscious or a common human psychic structure (although some investigators indirectly pointed to it), a passion arose to find out in which spot the fairy tales originated and the paths of their migration. Theodor Benfey tried to prove that all fairy tale motifs originated in India and had migrated to Europe,4 while others like Alfred Jensen, H. Winkler, and E. Stucken contended that all fairy tales were of a Babylonian origin and had then spread through Asia Minor and from there to Europe. There were many others who tried to construct such theories. One result was the creation of the folklore center known as the Finnish school, whose first representatives were Kaarle Krohn and Antti Aarne. These two men decided that it was not possible to discover only one country in which fairy tales originated, and they assumed that different tales might have had a different original home country. They made collections of the same types of fairy tales with the idea that of all the “Beauty and the Beast” tales, all the helpful-animal tales, and so on, the best and richest version, the most poetical and well-expressed, would be the original and all others would be derivations. There are still people nowadays who search along the same lines, but the hypothesis, it seems to me, can no longer survive because we can see that in being handed on, fairy tales need not necessarily degenerate but may just as well improve. To my thinking, therefore, the scholars of the Finnish school have given us a useful collection of motifs, but we cannot do much with their deductions. Aarne’s main book, Verzeichnis der Märchentypen, is now published in English.5