The Interpretation of Fairy Tales Read online

  To be accurate you would therefore say that the king does not represent the main function but is the archetypal basis of that function in the sense that he is that psychological factor which builds up the main functions in all people. Now you will say that I am contradicting myself, for first I said that the old king was the dominant of collective consciousness and now I say that he symbolizes that disposition which builds up main functions. How does that link up? Is that a contradiction? This seems to be a second interpretation, but if you reflect on how a main function builds up, then you will see that it builds up in the first half of human life and generally serves collective adaptation. If a child is good at playing with practical things, his father will say that he will be an engineer later, and the child is encouraged, and at school he will be very good in those fields and very bad in others; so he will be proud of what he can do well and will do that most, because there is a natural tendency to do always what one can do well and to neglect the other side. This one-sidedness slowly builds up the main function, which is that function with which one adapts to collective requirements. Hence the dominant of collective consciousness also constellates in the individual the main function.

  Take again the medieval man, for whom the dominant of the Self is the figure of Christ. If he has the disposition to become a thinking type, he will meditate with his thinking about the essence of Christ; if his inborn tendency is to become a feeling type, he will be moved by the prayers he hears and will not think about the symbol of Christ but will relate to him with his main function, feeling. That, therefore, is how the king represents the dominating symbolic content of a collective-conscious situation, and will also be connected with the main function in all people.

  Now the other sons would therefore logically have to be interpreted along the same lines: that is, the two sons who are intelligent and clever would represent the typical basis for building up the two auxiliary functions in a human being, and Dummling would represent the basis of building up the inferior function. But Dummling is not only this; he is also the hero, and the whole story is concerned with what happens to him. We must therefore discuss briefly what the hero means in a mythological story, because if you read many psychological interpretations of myths, you will soon see that there is a constant shift between interpreting the hero as a symbol of the Self and as a symbol of the ego. Even the same interpreters contradict themselves within the same text. They begin as if the hero were an ego, then shift to his being the Self.

  Before we discuss this problem, we have to be clear as to what we mean by ego. The ego is the central complex of the field of consciousness of the personality. But then, naturally, all other people have an ego too, so you can see that if we speak of the ego, that is already an abstraction, for we mean by that the “I” of all the people we know. If we repeat such a sentence as “The ego resists the unconscious,” then we make a general observation, something which applies on an average ego, stripped of all more subjective and unique qualities.

  We now have to look at the symbol of the hero in myths. What does he usually do? He is very often a savior: he saves his country and his people from dragons, witches, and evil spells. In many stories he is the finder of the hidden treasure. He frees his tribe and leads them out of all sorts of dangers. He reconnects his people with the gods and with life, or he renews the life principle. It is he who goes on the night-sea journey, and when he comes out of the belly of the whale, with him generally come all those who were swallowed before him. Sometimes he is likely to be overly self-confident and in certain myths destructive. Then the gods, or some enemy powers, decide to destroy him. In many hero myths he is also the innocent victim of evil powers. Then there is the hero-trickster figure, who plays good and bad tricks and who not only frees his people but at the same time gets them into difficulties; he helps certain people and destroys others by mistake or by thoughtlessness, so he is half a devil and half a savior, and again he is either destroyed, reformed, or transformed at the end of the story.

  Thus among the hero figures there is a great variety: the Dummling type; the trickster type; the strong man type; the innocent, beautiful youth type; the sorcerer type; the one who performs his deeds by magic, or by power and courage. We know from the investigations of child psychology that in the first twenty years of life, to take a broad estimate, the main tendency of the unconscious itself goes into building up a strong ego complex, and most of the early difficulties in youth result from disturbances of this process by negative parental influence or through some traumatic or other hindrance. In cases such as Michael Fordham has described in his publications, the ego complex is not capable of building itself up. But there are natural processes in the psyche of the child that we can watch, for they are mirrored in dreams, in which you can see how the ego builds up. One way, which one sees frequently, is in the ideal of the model hero. Papa often fills this role, as do tram conductors, policemen, elder brothers, or big boys in the class above at school, who receive the child’s transference. In secret daydreams the child imagines that that is what he would like to become. The fantasies of many little boys are of wearing a red cap and waving the trains on and off, of being the chief, the big boss, the king, and the chief of police. These model figures are projections produced by the unconscious; they either appear immediately in the dreams of young people or are projected onto outer figures, and they catch the fantasy of the child and influence his ego buildup. Every mother knows that. For instance, if you take a little boy to the dentist, then you say, ‘Well, you are the chief of police, so you can’t cry when a tooth is pulled out!’ That strengthens his ego so that he will force back his tears. That method is constantly employed in education; it is a trick. If a boy admires Albert in the next class and behaves badly, you say, “Albert wouldn’t do that,” and the boy at once pulls up his socks.

  Those are typical psychological processes showing how in a young person the ego complex, the center of the field of consciousness, is slowly formed. If you look more closely at these processes, you will see from dreams that they stem from the Self and that it is the Self which builds up the ego. A graphic representation would show first the unknown psychic totality of a human being—thought of as a sphere, not a circle—and then in the upper part of the sphere could be the field of consciousness; anything within this field is conscious to me. The center is the ego complex. What is not connected through some thread of association with my ego complex is unconscious to me. Before this field of consciousness exists, the self-regulating center (the Self is regarded as the totality and the regulating center of the whole personality, and it seems to be present from the very beginning of life) builds up the ego complex through certain emotional and other processes. If you study the symbolism of the ego complex and of the Self, you will see that the ego has the same structures and is to a great extent a mirror image of this center. We know the representations of the Self in mandala construction, for instance; the ego has the same fourfold subdivision. The center of the Self slowly builds up the ego complex, which then mirrors its original center and which, as we all know, often succumbs to the illusion of being that center. Most people who are not analyzed naturally believe—because of their emotional conviction that “I am I”—that “I” am the whole thing; and even that illusion comes from the ego’s having been formed from the total center. But in childhood there is the tragedy of separation; there is, for instance, the typical event of being thrown out of Paradise, of having one’s first shock of incompleteness and discovering that something perfect has been forever lost. Such tragedies mirror the moment when the ego begins to become an entity apart from the Self. Then the ego is established as a self-existing factor, and the intuitive connection with the center is partly lost.

  Now the ego, as far as we can see, functions properly only when it achieves a certain adaptation to the whole psyche, which means that it functions best if a certain plasticity is kept—in other words, when the ego is not petrified and therefore can, through dreams, moods, and
so on, still be influenced by the Self so as to adapt to the whole psychological system. It looks to us as though the ego were meant by nature not to be a ruler of the whole psychological setup, but to be an instrument, which functions best if it still obeys the basic instinctual urges of the totality and does not resist them.

  Imagine, for instance, that your instinct tells you to run away in a dangerous situation. (You do not require a very conscious ego to tell you that.) If a bull chases you, you do not need to consult your ego; you had better consult your legs, which know what to do. But if the ego functions with your legs, so that while running away from the bull you also look for a good hiding place or a fence to jump over, then the situation is perfect: your instincts and your ego function in accord with each other. If, on the other hand, you are a philosopher whose legs want to run away but who thinks: “Stop! I must first find out whether it is right to run away from a bull,” then the ego blocks the instinctual urge; it has become autonomous and anti-instinctive and then becomes a destructive nuisance, such as we see in every neurotic individual. A neurosis could even be defined as an ego formation no longer in harmony with the whole personality, whereas when the ego functions in accordance with the larger totality, it reinforces itself and improves the innate cleverness of the basic instinctive arrangement.

  Naturally sometimes the ego would also be useful in resisting instinct. Imagine, for instance, the North Arctic lemmings, which get an instinctual urge to make a migration into another country where they can start again with a new food supply. Driven by an instinctual urge, they collect together and then march on. If, by a piece of bad luck, they come to the sea or a river, they go into it and drown by the thousands. I am sure you know this story, which has always puzzled zoologists, for it shows the silly unadaptedness of some natural instincts. Konrad Lorenz once gave a lecture with many such examples; I remember one about a bird which, to please its mate in the mating season, produces an enormous red sack on his chest with which to enforce his mating song. This red sack is so heavy that he cannot fly, so his enemies gather and butcher that bird. So that is not a very good invention. A beautiful red tail or a red behind like a baboon’s to please his wife would be much better and would not prevent him from flying away. So you see, instinctual patterns are not only positive. If a lemming could ask itself what it was doing and reflect that it did not want to drown, and could go back, that would be very useful for it. So that is probably why nature has invented the ego as a new instrument for us; we are a new experiment of nature, for we have an additional instrument for regulating the instinctual urges. We do not live only on our patterns of behavior but have this strange addition known as the ego.

  The ideal situation, as far as we can see, is when the ego, with a certain plasticity, obeys the central regulation of the psyche. But when it hardens and becomes autonomous, acting according to its own reasons, then there is often a neurotic constellation. This happens not only to individuals, but also collectively, which is why we speak of collective neuroses and psychoses. Whole groups of mankind can drift into that split situation and deviate from their basic instinctual patterns, and then disaster is close. That is why in hero stories there is nearly always an exposition of a terrible situation: the land is drying up because the toads block the water of life, or some dark enemy comes from the north and steals all the women and there is no fertility in the land. Whatever this terrible story is, the hero has the task of putting it right. The dragon may be demanding all the king’s maidens to be sacrificed. Everyone in the country is already wearing black, and now the last princess has to be given to the dragon—then always the hero comes.

  The hero, therefore, is the restorer of a healthy, conscious situation. He is the one ego that restores to healthy, normal functioning a situation in which all the egos of that tribe or nation are deviating from their instinctive, basic totality pattern. It can therefore be said that the hero is an archetypal figure which presents a model of an ego functioning in accord with the Self. Produced by the unconscious psyche, it is a model to be looked at, and it is demonstrating a rightly functioning ego, an ego that functions in accordance with the requirements of the Self. That is why the hero seems, to a certain extent, to be the Self: because he serves as its instrument and completely expresses what the Self wants to have happen. In a way, therefore, he is also the Self, because he expresses or incarnates its healing tendencies. So the hero has this strange double character. From the feeling standpoint you can naively understand that. If you hear a hero myth, you identify with the hero and get infected by his mood. Let us say, for instance, that an Eskimo tribe is on the way to starvation. Caribou hunting has been bad, and primitives very easily give up and die from discouragement before it is physically or psychologically necessary. And then comes a storyteller and tells about a fellow who made contact with ghosts and by that saved his starving tribe, and so on. That puts them on their feet again, purely emotionally. The ego adopts a heroic, courageous, and hopeful attitude that saves the collective situation. That is why a hero story is a vital necessity in difficult life conditions. If you have your hero myth again, then you can live. It is something to live for. You are naturally encouraged by it.

  When you tell fairy tales to children, they at once and naively identify and get all the feeling of the story. If you tell them about the poor little duck, all the children who have inferiority complexes hope that in the end they too will get a princess. That functions exactly as it should; it gives a model for living, an encouraging, vivifying model which reminds one unconsciously of all life’s positive possibilities.

  There is a beautiful custom among Australian aborigines: when the rice does not grow well, the women go into the rice field and squat among the rice and tell it the myth of the origin of the rice. Then the rice knows again why it is there and grows like anything. That is probably a projection of our own situation; for with us it is certainly true, for if we get those myths we think that now we know again what we are living for, and that changes our whole lifemood and can even sometimes change our physiological condition.

  If you interpret the hero in this way, then you see why Dummling would be the hero. Since the king is the dominant of the collective conscious attitude which has lost contact with the flow of life, especially with the feminine, the Eros principle, Dummling represents the new conscious attitude which is capable of contacting the feminine, for he is the one who brings up the toad-princess. Characteristically, he is the one who is called stupid and seemingly unlucky. But if you look at his behavior more closely, you see that he is simply spontaneous and naive; he takes things as they are. For instance, the two other brothers cannot accept facts. Each time Dummling wins, they want another competition, saying that that one was not right. But Dummling always simply does the next thing. When he has to marry a frog—well, that is not very pleasant, but that’s how it is. Obviously, it is that quality which is emphasized in our story.

  We should always look at these stories as we do at the dreams of individuals and ask what conscious situation is compensated by such a myth. Then you clearly see that such a story compensates the conscious attitude of a society in which patriarchal schemes and oughts and shoulds dominate. It is ruled by rigid principles because of which the irrational, spontaneous adaptation to events is lost. It is typical that Dummling stories are statistically more frequent in the white man’s society than in others, and it is obvious why that is so. We are the people who, by an overdevelopment of consciousness, have lost the flexibility of taking life as it is. That is why Dummling stories are especially valuable for us. We have also an overwhelming number of stories where the hero excels through just plain laziness; he simply sits on a stove and scratches himself, and then everything falls into his lap. These stories also compensate for the collective attitude which puts too much emphasis on efficiency: then those lazy hero stories are told and retold with great delight—and with a healing meaning in them.

  Now the king does not know to whom he should leave the kingdom
. There he deviates from his probable former behavior, for he leaves it to fate to settle who shall inherit the kingdom. This is not the general behavior. It is frequent in the case of the old king, but it is not the only possible one. There are, for instance, other stories where the old king has information—a dream perhaps, or a prophecy about who is to be the next king—and he puts all his passion and strength and skill into destroying his possible successor. That is another type of story. An example would be Grimms’ “The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs,” but there are thousands of them. Sometimes at the beginning of the story the king gives his possible successors a chance, but if a successor who does not suit his plans is chosen, then he begins to resist.

  There are neurotic people whose ego attitude has derived from their whole psychological nature yet who come into analysis without great resistances, for they just want to know “What next?” and if their dreams produce some new life, they take it and go on, with practically no resistance. With them the “succession of the king”—one ego attitude replaced by another—is relatively easy. But there are others who describe their symptoms and you look at their dreams, but if you even mildly suggest what the trouble might be, they jump at your throat and argue that it may be anything else, but it is certainly not that. That they know is all right, and they fight back forever. This is the type of ego formation which has already stiffened to such an extent that it absolutely refuses the possibility of a renewal. I often say to such people that they have the attitude of a person who goes to a doctor and asks the doctor please to cure him—but not to examine the urine because that is something private. A lot of people do this. They go into analysis but keep the main information in their pockets because it is nobody’s business to know about that. In all such variations of behavior you see the old king—which in an individual means the center of consciousness—resisting renewal.