Amplification Against Personalistic Reduction

The thread running through marie-louise-von-franz‘s fairy-tale, dream, and alchemical work is a sustained polemic against the reduction of archetypal material to the personal biography of the interpreter or the dreamer. The tale is not the family novel. The dream is not the neurotic autobiography. The alchemical text is not a pathography. Each belongs to a register the personalistic reduction cannot read.

Her canonical statement is in The Interpretation of Fairy Tales: “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)” (von Franz 1970). The abandoned child of the tale is the divine-child; treating him as Johnny-down-the-street loses the figure.

The discipline that enforces the register is amplification. The motif is placed against the full archive of its analogues across the tradition — Greek, alchemical, Hermetic, Gnostic, Polynesian, biblical — until the archetypal structure is visible behind the particular tale. Von Franz grants the interpretive circle: “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” (Interpretation of Fairy Tales).

The thread contrasts with the Freudian tradition and with later psychoanalytic readings of fairy tales (Bettelheim’s Uses of Enchantment) that treat the archetypal image as a disguised personal wish. It is the point on which the Jungian method stakes its claim to read myth as myth.

Sources

• marie-louise-von-franz: the archetypal is not reducible to the personal biography; amplification holds the register
• carl-jung: the method of amplification as the discipline that opens the collective layer
• sigmund-freud: the opposing position for which archetypal material is disguised personal content