Seba.Health
Work · Seba Knowledge Graph
Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales
Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales
Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales is marie-louise-von-franz‘s treatment of the problem of moral darkness within the folk-narrative tradition. Published as a C. G. Jung Foundation book in 1974, it amplifies archetypal patterns of evil — the devouring stepmother, the witch, the dark brother, the troll — and reads them as the collective unconscious’s way of posing the ethical problem that the dominant Christian symbol can no longer hold.
Her reading of the king motif is characteristic: “We can assume that the king represents the dominant collective symbol of our era, that is, of Christianity” (von Franz 1974). The aging king of the tale is the Christian dominant grown tired; the renewal or displacement of the king is the psyche’s effort to bring a new dominant to the throne. Evil in the tale is therefore not merely the presence of malevolent figures but the structural condition of a reigning symbol that has lost its capacity to integrate the whole.
Von Franz’s central analytic contribution in the volume is the distinction between the shadow that the tale’s hero can assimilate — the lazy brother, the foolish sister, the inferior but redeemable figure — and the shadow that the tale figures as unredeemable: the witch who must be burned, the evil king who must be overthrown. The first corresponds to Jung’s personal shadow and its moral work of integration. The second corresponds to the archetypal shadow and its extreme, absolute evil, which the tale’s ethical structure does not permit to be assimilated but only resisted, survived, or escaped. The book thus carries forward the distinction Jung drew in jung-aion between the shadow one can integrate and the evil one cannot. Von Franz’s achievement is to show that the fairy tale, uninstructed by modern analytical psychology, had already made the distinction and encoded it in narrative structure.
The book draws on the full archive of Grimm (“The Two Brothers,” “The Two Travelers,” “Vasilisa the Beautiful”), Icelandic tales (“Trunt, Trunt, and the Trolls in the Mountains”), and East Asian sources, and stands beside erich-neumann‘s Depth Psychology and a New Ethic as one of the two major Jungian treatments of the ethical problem posed by the shadow.