Fairy Tale

The fairy tale — Märchen, the wonder tale distinct from the legend and the myth proper — is, for the Jungian tradition, the purest expression of the archetypal structures of the collective-unconscious. Marie-Louise von Franz argued that precisely because fairy tales are anonymous, collective, and worn smooth by generations of oral transmission, they are the most transparent surviving records of how the psyche images its typical configurations — the hero, the wicked stepmother, the wise old man, the animal helper, the three tasks, the underworld descent, the recovery of what was lost.

Von Franz’s method — represented in The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, The Feminine in Fairy Tales, and the work the graph cites as von-franz-archetypal-patterns-fairy — reads the tale structurally, mapping its movements onto the dynamics of the individuating psyche. Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s Women Who Run with the Wolves carried the method into a different register. See fairy-tale-as-medicine.

Relationships

• marie-louise-von-franz
• von-franz-archetypal-patterns-fairy
• collective-unconscious