Inferior Function as Fairy-Tale Fourth

The fairy-tale figure of the foolish or despised youngest son — Ivan riding the shaggy horse backward, the cripple, the soldier wounded and discharged into the woods — is read across the post-Jungian tradition as the archetypal image of the inferior-function in its compensatory aspect. marie-louise-von-franz cautions against forcing the typological mapping too tightly: “I have often tried, in interpreting fairy tales, to go further into detail and to call the king the thinking and the fourth son the feeling function, but in my experience that does not work.” What survives is the structural pattern: “in mythology, as soon as the fool appears as the fourth in a group of four people, we have a certain right to assume that he mirrors the general behavior of an inferior function” (von Franz and Hillman 2013).

james-hillman presses the point further: the fool is “an archetypal religious figure, embracing more than only the inferior function. He implies a part of the human personality, or even of humanity, which remained behind and therefore still has the original wholeness of nature” (von Franz and Hillman 2013). The fourth is never simply weakest. It is the place where the religious dimension enters the psychological. edward-edinger reads the same dynamic in the alchemical Maria axiom: “from the third comes the one as the fourth” — the missing piece whose admission turns trinity into quaternity and produces the lapis-philosophorum (edinger-mysterium-lectures 1995; Jung 1959, ¶430).

The fairy-tale fourth and the typological fourth are therefore not two doctrines but one. The despised youngest son inherits the kingdom because the fourth, admitted, completes the personality. The Lineage’s mythological imagination and its psychological theory converge at this point: the redeemer is always the one consciousness has refused.

Sources

• marie-louise-von-franz: the fool as fourth in a group of four mirrors the behavior of the inferior function (1993; 2013).
• james-hillman: the fool is an archetypal religious figure carrying the original wholeness of nature (2013).
• edward-edinger: the fourth that turns trinity into quaternity is the alchemical lapis (edinger-mysterium-lectures 1995).
• carl-jung: “from the third comes the one as the fourth” (the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious 1959, ¶430).