The Seba library treats Fox in 9 passages, across 2 authors (including von Franz, Marie-Louise, James, William).
foxes are supposed to be the souls of witches. In our local stories, it is believed that when a witch goes out, her body lies in bed, half-dead, and her soul goes out as a fox and causes damage.
Von Franz establishes the fox as the exteriorized, destructive soul of the witch across European folklore, linking it to demonic cunning and a tradition that extends into East Asian belief.
, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 1970thesis
"Foxes are false animals, they always use crooked ways and therefore represent cunning sly demons." This fits with the fact that in Southern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, foxes are supposed to be the souls of witches.
Von Franz situates the medieval allegorical tradition of the fox as demonic deceiver within a continuous folklore complex linking the animal to witch-soul projection and hysteria.
, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970thesis
"The miller went out to shoot the fox, and the fox said, 'Miller, don't shoot me.' ... everybody knew that she was the fox and that it was she who had killed the miller." There is a general belief in witches taking the form of foxes.
A fairy-tale case study demonstrates the folk identification of the fox with the witch's roaming soul, illustrating the archetype's persistence through oral transmission and its connection to mortal danger.
, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970thesis
the next creature the little prince meets is a fox, who tells him that he wants the little prince to tame him ... "I cannot play with you," the fox said. "I am not tamed."
Von Franz reads the fox in The Little Prince as the figure that initiates the puer aeternus into the principle of relatedness, making taming the central metaphor for psychological commitment and feeling.
, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970thesis
the next creature the little prince meets is a fox, who tells him that he wants the little prince to tame him ... "I cannot play with you," the fox said. "I am not tamed."
The parallel passage in the Puer Aeternus study confirms the fox as depth-psychological teacher of felt relationship, contrasted with the puer's characteristic avoidance of binding commitments.
, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 1970thesis
I remembered the fox. One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets himself be tamed ... he only feels some slight sorrow at leaving the fox. It does not occur to him ... that he could get into a conflict and take that conflict seriously.
Von Franz shows the little prince's failure to integrate the fox's lesson as symptomatic of puer psychology: the sorrow of parting is acknowledged sentimentally but not taken as a serious relational obligation.
, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970supporting
I remembered the fox. One runs the risk of weeping a little, if one lets himself be tamed ... The decision is one-sidedly in favor of a return to the rose and to the Beyond.
The failure to honor the bond with the fox emblematizes the puer's one-sided transcendentalism — the preference for an idealized distant object over the embodied relational tie.
, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 1970supporting
it has always, for a time at least, driven him who had it into the wilderness, often into the literal wilderness out of doors, where the Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, St. Francis, George Fox, and so many others had to go.
William James invokes George Fox as archetype of the solitary religious innovator whose first-hand mystical experience necessarily precedes institutional recognition, exemplifying radical individual religious isolation.
, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting
the fox ate the grapes, as opposed to the apples or peaches ... The active sentence emphasizes the fox, whereas the passive emphasizes the grapes.
William James employs 'the fox' as a purely grammatical illustration of deep versus surface linguistic structure, with no psychological or symbolic valence.
, The Principles of Psychology, 1890aside