giants
Within the depth-psychology corpus, the figure of the Giant occupies a precise and recurrent symbolic position: it stands at the threshold between the archetypal and the human, embodying forces that are neither fully divine nor fully personal. Von Franz, the most sustained voice on this term, reads the Giant as a symbol of overwhelming, untamed emotion — a psychic force too large and undifferentiated to be integrated directly, akin to the Titans of Greek mythology who inhabit the space between gods and mortals. Her analyses in Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales locate the Giant as a figure of ‘compartment psychology,’ drawing life from sources incompatible with its actions. Hillman adds a phenomenological dimension: the Giant is the literalist, the reductionist, the consciousness that can only think in ‘onlys,’ crushing metaphor and imagination beneath its physical stupidity. Kerényi situates the Giant within classical mythological genealogies — Orion as Earth-born, Tityos as phallic and chthonic — grounding the figure in primordial generative and destructive powers. The Norse mythological tradition, via Campbell, casts Giants as eschatological opponents of the gods in the Ragnarök drama. Across these voices, the Giant consistently represents the shadow-side of magnitude: power without differentiation, force without reflection, unconscious energy that threatens both heroic consciousness and the symbolic order.
Giants are notoriously slow-witted, cursed with physical thinking, short-sighted, and always hungry (because they are so empty?). Skrymir is our literalist, our reductionist, who never can quite get it.
Hillman defines the Giant as the archetypal figure of literalistic, reductionist thinking that collapses metaphor and threatens imaginative consciousness.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis
The giants between gods and men, we interpret the figures of gods as symbols or as archetypal images… an archetypal image has a certain order which it conveys, or imposes, on the human being.
Von Franz positions Giants as intermediate figures between archetypal order and human chaos, representing energies that have not yet achieved the structured form of divine images.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974thesis
The giant represents destructive emotion… The giant resembles people who draw their real secret of life, their power and their life possibility, from something with which their actions do not coincide.
Von Franz interprets the Giant as a symbol of psychological compartmentalization, embodying the split between an unconscious life-source and consciously incompatible behavior.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974thesis
He can only weaken and overcome him by not fighting him openly, but by getting at the core of his being whence he draws all his secret energy.
Von Franz describes the psychological strategy for dealing with the Giant-complex: not direct confrontation but subtle undermining of its hidden source of power.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974thesis
Since the giant is the enemy, and since at the end of a story a church is mentioned, we must assume that there is a connection between the giant and the masculine, logos-dominated totality that lacks the feminine.
Von Franz links the Giant’s antagonism to a one-sided masculine psychic totality, suggesting it emerges where Eros and the feminine are structurally absent.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
On this island there are giants. Islands often harbor projections of the unconscious psychic sphere; for instance, there are islands of the dead.
Von Franz identifies Giants as inhabitants of liminal, island-spaces that project unconscious contents, associating them with the realm of the dead and otherworldly forces.
, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970supporting
A huge giant had picked him up out of curiosity and carefully carried him home as company for his giant wife. These old giants were very affable and deferred to the king’s son’s every wish.
Von Franz presents the Giant in a benevolent, archaic role as guardian and donor figure, illustrating the ambivalence of the Giant archetype between destruction and numinous hospitality.
, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970supporting
From it, after ten months, arose Orion, an Earth-born giant. Thus the gods bestowed a son upon their host, who had previously been childless.
Kerényi grounds the Giant figure in classical mythology as an Earth-born being, directly generated by divine semen, bridging the gap between mortal human and god.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting
The giant Tityos (to judge by his name, a phallic being), son of Zeus and Elara… he grew so great that his mother perished of him, and he was therefore finally born by Earth.
Kerényi characterizes the Greek giant Tityos as an excess of phallic, chthonic energy whose very magnitude destroys his mortal mother and demands divine suppression.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting
The battle of mutual slaughter of the gods and giants… Yggdrasil shakes, and shiver on high the ancient limbs, and the giant is loose.
Campbell situates the Giant within the Norse eschatological drama as the ultimate opponent of cosmic divine order, whose loosening signals the dissolution of the world.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
The wolf said he would show him the giant’s court. He took him there and showed him his six brothers and their princesses all turned into stone.
Von Franz presents the Giant as an agent of petrification — a figure whose power arrests and immobilizes the living, representing overwhelming unconscious dominance.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
Rabelais did not himself invent the theme of this comic adventure. In the chapbook of the Giant Gargantua… the 2,943 armed men who were to strangle Gargantua in his sleep wandered into his open mouth.
Auerbach traces the literary-comic tradition of the Giant in Rabelais, noting how the motif of men swallowed by the Giant’s body satirizes physical enormity as grotesque absorption.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside
Giant, symbol; church and; emotions and; weather and. ‘Giant Who Didn’t Have His Heart with Him, The’
This index entry from von Franz’s volume identifies the Giant’s symbolic associations — church, emotion, weather — and signals the key tale of the externalized heart as a central analytic reference.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974aside
‘Quiet!’ said the second stone giant. ‘I cannot think while you talk.’
Ulanov’s use of the Stone Giant figures in an Iroquois tale illustrates the cross-cultural persistence of the Giant archetype as a powerful but cognitively limited force that must be overcome by wit and community.
, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971aside