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Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales
Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales
Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales is marie-louise-von-franz‘s last major fairy-tale volume — a late set of Zurich Jung Institute lectures published in 1997, at the end of her life. The book reads six tales in full, with unusual attention to the national signature of a given archetypal pattern: the Germanic tales, the Spanish tales, the Slavic tales each carry the archetype inflected by the psychic weak spot of their cultural ground. “Each country has its own weak spot” (von Franz 1997), and the fairy tale stages that weak spot as the contest the hero must pass.
The methodological signature carried over from von-franz-interpretation-of-fairy-tales: the tale is read against the full archive of its analogues, not against the reader’s biography. The anima who lures the princess toward the troll — the cool, deadly feminine figure — is read against comparable figures in Greek myth, in alchemy (the “dove hidden in the lead”), and in Gnostic sources. The interpretive rule she formulates here is terse and definitive: “the healing factor is generally hidden in the very factor that is making one neurotic. A neurosis is always a package with an unpleasant outer shell, and when you open the package you find the elixir that cures the neurosis. The neurosis itself contains the healing thing” (von Franz 1997).
The book extends without superseding von-franz-interpretation-of-fairy-tales; the earlier volume states the method, this one practices it at length.