The Interpretation of Fairy Tales

by Marie-Louise von Franz

  At the same time there was a movement led by Max Müller which tried to interpret myths as travesties of natural phenomena such as the sun and its different appearances (solar myth, Frobenius), the moon (lunar myth, P. Ehrenreich), the dawn (Stucken and Gubernatis), the life of vegetation (Mannhardt) and the storm (Adalbert Kuhn).

  In the nineteenth century some people were already groping in another direction, and here a man must be mentioned who is rarely remembered, although to my mind he has great merit, and that is Ludwig Laistner, who wrote Das Rätsel der Sphinx.6 His hypothesis was that the basic fairy tale and folktale motifs derive from dreams. But he concentrates chiefly on nightmare motifs. Basically, he is trying to show a connection between recurring typical dreams and folklore motifs, and he cites interesting material to prove his point. Though not with reference to folklore, the ethnologist Karl von der Steinen, at the same time, tried at the end of his book Voyage to Central Brazil to explain that most magic and supernatural beliefs of the primitives he had been studying derived from dream experiences, for it is a typical mode of primitive behavior that dream experience is regarded as actual and real experience. For instance, if someone dreams that he was in heaven where he talked to an eagle, he is quite justified in telling this the next morning as a fact, without adding that he dreamt it, and that, according to Von der Steinen, is how such stories originated. Another scholar, Adolf Bastian, had an interesting theory that all basic mythological motifs are, as he called them, “elementary thoughts” of mankind.7 His hypothesis was that mankind has a store of Elementargedanken (elementary thoughts), which do not migrate but are inborn in every individual, and that those thoughts appear in different varieties in India, Babylonia, and even, for instance, in South Sea stories. He called the specific stories Völkergedanken (national thoughts). His idea clearly approaches Jung’s idea of the archetype and the archetypal image, the archetype being the structural basic disposition to produce a certain mythologem, the specific form in which it takes shape being the archetypal image. The elementary thoughts, according to Bastian, are a hypothetical factor; that is, you never see an elementary thought, but the many national thoughts point to the existence of one basic thought underneath.

  Intellectuals are sometimes tempted to view archetypes as philosophical thoughts, a misunderstanding which arises out of the very nature of archetypes. We would disagree with Bastian where he speaks of these motifs as “thoughts.” He was a very philosophically minded person, obviously a thinking type, and he even tried to interpret some elementary thoughts by associating them with ideas of Kant and Leibniz. For us, on the contrary, the archetype is not only an “elementary thought” but also an elementary poetical image and fantasy, and an elementary emotion, and even an elementary impulse toward some typical action. So we add to it a whole substructure of feeling, emotion, fantasy, and action, which Bastian did not include in his theory.

  The hypothesis of Ludwig Laistner and later of Georg Jakob, who wrote a book on the fairy tale and the dream in much the same way as Laistner,8 had no success, nor were the suggestions made by Karl von der Steinen accepted. Bastian also was discarded by the general scientific world, which went on more along the line of the English Folklore Society and the Finnish Society of Folklore, and since Antti Aarne’s book, mentioned above, an enormous and useful work by Stith Thompson has been produced, entitled Motif Index of Folk Literature.9

  Beside the collecting of parallels, new schools have come into existence, one of which is the so-called literary school. It investigates from a purely literary and formal standpoint the difference between the various types of tale, namely the myth, legend, amusing story, animal story, trickster story, and what one might call the classical fairy tale.10 This forms a very meritorious study. With the typical method of the literary schools, researchers began to compare the hero of the legend with the type of hero in the classical fairy tale and so on. Interesting results have come to light, and I recommend these works.

  Another modern movement consists of a group of ethnologists, archeologists, and specialists in mythology and the comparative history of religion, practically all of whom know Jung and Jungian psychology but try to interpret mythological motifs omitting Jung’s hypotheses—and naturally the name of Jung as well—and to make indirect use of Jung’s discoveries. They write books with titles such as The Great Goddess or The Threefold Godhead or The Hero, and they do not take as a starting point the human individual and his psychic structure, which has produced these symbols, but they sit in the middle of the archetype, so to speak, and let it amplify itself, poetically and “scientifically.”

  In mythology there is Julius Schwabe and sometimes Mircea Eliade.11 There is also Otto Huth, who works on fairy tales in this way, Robert Graves, and in some ways Erich Fromm. That is to name just a few, but there are many more. These people are punished for their unscientific and illegitimate approach because they fall into something that they did not foresee. As soon as one approaches an archetype in this way, everything becomes everything. If you start with the world tree, you can easily prove that every mythological motif leads to the world tree in the end. If you start with the sun, you can easily prove that everything is finally a solar motif. And so you just get lost in the chaos of interconnections and overlapping meanings which all archetypal images have with one another. If you choose the Great Mother or the world tree or the sun or the underworld or the eye, or something else, as a motif, then you can pile up comparative material forever, but you have completely lost your Archimedean standpoint from which to interpret.

  In the last paper he wrote, Jung pointed out that this is a great temptation for the intellectual type because intellectuals overlook the emotional and feeling factor, which is always connected with an archetypal image.12 An archetypal image is not only a thought pattern (as a thought pattern it is connected with every other thought pattern); it is also an emotional experience—the emotional experience of an individual. Only if it has an emotional and feeling value for an individual is it alive and meaningful. As Jung said, you can collect all the Great Mothers in the world and all the saints and everything else, and what you have gathered means absolutely nothing if you leave out the feeling experience of the individual.

  Now that is a difficulty, because our whole academic training tends to discard this factor. In college, especially in the natural sciences, when the teacher shows the class a crystal, girls particularly tend to cry out, “Oh, what a beautiful crystal,” and then the teacher says, “We are not now admiring the beauty, but want to analyze the structure of this thing.” So you are constantly and habitually trained, from the very beginning, to repress your personal emotional reaction and to train your mind to be what we call objective. Now this is all right as far as it goes. I quite agree with it up to a point, but we cannot do it in psychology in the same way, and that is, as Jung said, the difficult position of psychology as a science, for psychology, in contrast to all the other sciences, cannot afford to overlook feeling. It has to take into consideration the feeling tone and emotional value of outer and inner factors, including the observer’s feeling reaction as well. As you know, modern physics does accept the fact that the observer and the theoretical hypothesis he has in his mind, on account of which he builds up the experimental setup, does play a role in the result of his investigation. What is not yet accepted is that the emotional factor in the observer may play a role. But physicists will have to rethink that—for, as Wolfgang Pauli has pointed out, we have no a priori reason to reject it. Most certainly we can say that in psychology we have to take it into consideration. That is why so many academic scientists call Jungian psychology unscientific, because it takes into consideration a factor which has hitherto been habitually and intentionally excluded from the scientific outlook. But our critics do not see that this is not just a whim of ours, or that it is not because we are still so childish that we cannot repress our personal feeling reactions to the material. We know from conscious scientific insight that these feelings are nec
essary and belong in the method of psychology, if you want to get at the phenomenon in the right way.

  If an individual has an archetypal experience—for instance, an overwhelming dream of an eagle coming in through the window—this is not only a thought pattern about which you can say, “Oh yes, the eagle is a messenger from God, and it was one of Zeus’s messengers and of Jupiter’s, and in North American mythology the eagle appears as a creator,” et cetera. If you do that, it is intellectually quite correct for you amplify the archetype, but you overlook the emotional experience. Why is it an eagle and not a raven and not a fox and not an angel? Mythologically, an angel and an eagle are the same thing: an angelos, a winged messenger from heaven, from the beyond, from the Godhead, but for the dreamer it makes a lot of difference if he dreams about an angel and all that it means to him or if he dreams of an eagle with all his positive and negative reactions to the eagle. You cannot just skip the dreamer’s emotional reactions, though scientifically Eliade and Huth and Fromm and others will simply say both are messengers from the Beyond. Intellectually it is the same thing, but emotionally there is a difference. Thus you cannot ignore the individual and the whole setup into which such an experience falls.

  The representatives of this outlook try to pull all the results of Jungian psychology backward into the old setup of academic thinking and to push aside the most important factor which Jung introduced into the science of myths: namely, the human basis from which such motifs grow. But you cannot study plants without studying the soil on which they grow: melons grow best on dunghills and not on sand, and if you are a good gardener, you have a knowledge of the soil as well as of the plants, and in mythology we are the soil of the symbolic motifs—we, the individual human beings. This fact cannot be ignored under the pretext that it does not exist, but to exclude it is a terrific temptation for thinking types and intellectuals because doing so fits into their habitual attitude.

  Let us take the motif of the tree, for example. Let us assume that I am an investigator who has a tree complex, so I will start with that. Being emotionally fascinated by it, I shall say, “Oh, the sun myth and the tree myth are connected, for in the morning the sun is born in the east out of the tree. There is, for instance, the Christmas tree, and every Christmas the tree gives birth to the new light at the moment of the winter solstice. So all the sun myths are in a way also tree myths. But then the tree is also a mother. You know that in Saxony, even now, it is said that beautiful girls grow under the leaves of trees, and I could show you pictures showing that children come from trees; the souls of unborn children rustle under the leaves, and that is why there are trees in the center of all German, Austrian, and Swiss villages. The tree is therefore the Great Mother. But the tree is not only the mother of life but also the death mother, because from trees coffins are made, and there are the tree burials. The shamans of circumpolar tribes and people in certain North Canadian tribes are buried in a tree. Probably also the Babylonian Zikkurats and those columns on which the Persians put their dead are also a travesty of the tree. Then, have you ever thought of the tree and the well? Under every tree there is a spring. There is the world-ash Yggdrasil with the Urd well underneath, for instance. I can show you Babylonian seals on which there is a tree underneath the well of life, so that all the motifs of the water of life are really associated with the tree; you put your searchlight onto it, and it just depends on tree mythology. That is quite clear! Everybody sees that. But you can also bring the moon in. As the mother the tree is feminine, but it is also the father because the tree is a phallic symbol; for instance, in the Aztec chronicles the word for the original land where the Aztecs and Mayans emigrated represents a broken-off tree, a kind of tree trunk, and the trunk form is a phallic father-image. There are stories of a woman passing a tree and a seed from the tree entering her womb. Therefore, clearly the tree is a father, and that links up with the tree being the sun, which is a father figure. That is obvious!”

  If you have a sun complex, then everything is solar, and if you have a moon complex, everything is lunar.

  In the unconscious all archetypes are contaminated with one another. It is as if several photographs were printed one over the other; they cannot be disentangled. This has probably to do with the relative timelessness and spacelessness of the unconscious. It is like a package of representations which are simultaneously present. Only when the conscious mind looks at it is one motif selected, because you put your searchlight onto it, and it just depends on where you direct your searchlight first, for in some way you always get the whole of the collective unconscious. Thus for one scientist the mother is everything, for another everything is vegetation, and for another everything is a solar myth. The amusing thing is that all such intellectuals, when they see the connection—for instance, between the tree and the sun or the coffin—then say, “of course” or “obviously” or “naturally.” The tree is obviously the mother, for instance. I watch to see where the investigator uses these words. It is temptingly easy because archetypal connections are obvious and natural, and so the writer says “naturally” or “obviously” and is sure that all his readers will walk into the same trap. Only the intellectual type gets caught in this trap. Others after a while revolt, realizing that it is not possible for everything to be everything else, and they return to the emotional value in difference between symbols.

  Actually you can interpret a myth or fairy tale with any of the four functions of consciousness. The thinking type will point out the structure and the way in which all the motifs connect. The feeling type will put them in a value order (a hierarchy of values), which is also completely rational. With the feeling function a good and complete fairy tale interpretation can be made. The sensation type will just look at the symbols and amplify them. The intuitive will see the whole package in its oneness, so to speak; he will be most gifted in showing that the whole fairy tale is not a discursive story but is really one message, split up into many facets. The more you have differentiated your functions, the better you can interpret because you must circumambulate a story as much as possible with all four functions. The more you have developed and obtained the use of more conscious functions, the better and the more colorful your interpretation will be. It is an art which has to be practiced. It cannot be learned—apart from some general indications, which I will try to give. I always tell students not to memorize my lecture, but to try to interpret fairy tales themselves, for that is the only way to learn. Interpretation is an art, a craft actually, which finally depends on you yourself. The class where everyone interprets the same fairy tale is almost a confession. That cannot be avoided. And it’s right, for you have to put your whole being into it.

  We must begin by asking why in Jungian psychology we are interested in myths and fairy tales. Dr. Jung once said that it is in fairy tales that one can best study the comparative anatomy of the psyche. In myths or legends, or any other more elaborate mythological material, we get at the basic patterns of the human psyche through a lot of the cultural material. But in fairy tales there is much less specific cultural-conscious material, and therefore they mirror the basic patterns of the psyche more clearly.

  One of the things that other psychological schools throw at our heads is that we analysts see archetypes everywhere, that our patients apparently dream about archetypes every night, but their patients never produce such material. If the analyst does not know what archetypal motifs are, naturally he does not notice them; he interprets them personally by linking them up with personal memories. In order to be able to spot archetypal material, we have first to have a general knowledge of it—one important reason why we try to learn as much as possible about these motifs and their different setups.

  But there is another reason that has proved even more important practically and leads to more essential problems. If someone has a dream and you already have the anamnesis—that is, his general outer and inner life story—even if you try to refrain from doing so, you usually have made a kind of general hypothesis
about what the dreamer’s problem is: that this is a mother-bound man or a father-bound daughter, an animus-ridden woman, or God knows what else. Suppose, for instance, you have the hypothesis that a certain analysand is greatly bothered by her animus, and when she brings you the dream of a burglar, which frightened her terribly, then you have an “Aha! There we have it!” reaction. You don’t notice that you have not interpreted the dream but have only recognized in it what you guessed. You linked it up with what you already intuitively supposed to be the trouble. Then you call the burglar an animus figure, and it looks like an objective interpretation. But you have not really learned to interpret the dream scientifically, having no hypothesis as to what will emerge from its motifs. We should look at dreams as objectively as possible and then only at the end deduce a conclusion. For the dream gives a new message which neither the analyst nor the analysand knew before.