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The Interpretation of Fairy Tales
The Interpretation of Fairy Tales
The Interpretation of Fairy Tales is the methodological volume of marie-louise-von-franz‘s fairy-tale corpus. Delivered as a C. G. Jung Foundation book, it sets out the technique by which the fairy tale is read as a primary document of the collective unconscious. Its opening move is to distinguish depth-psychological interpretation from the Freudian readings of Silberer, Wittgenstein, Bettelheim, and Laiblin, and to locate its own apparatus in Jung’s own early work Symbols of Transformation and in the later volume with karl-kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology.
The central discipline the book imposes is the refusal to reduce archetypal material to personal biography. Von Franz writes: “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). The tale is not a disguised family romance. It is the psyche speaking in its own register.
The reader is taught to read the tale for the self (the Christ figure, the hero as model, the ring motif), for the shadow (assimilation, collective, female, repressed), for the anima, and for the symbolic and numerical structure of the motif (von Franz, index).