The Interpretation of Fairy Tales

by Marie-Louise von Franz

  The anima in our story aims at the center, while the peasant women represent an undifferentiated, clumsy attitude which is glued too much to the idea of concrete reality, and therefore they fall short; they cannot stand the test, for they represent a too primitive and undifferentiated feeling attitude.

  I would recommend in this connection Jung’s talk given in 1939, “The Symbolic Life.”27 He says that we are now all caught in rationalism and that our rational outlook on life includes being reasonable and that this reasonableness excludes all symbolism. He goes on to show how much richer life is for people still embedded in the living symbolism of their religious forms. As Jung himself discovered, one can find the way back to some living symbolism—not to the lost symbolism, however, but to the still-living function that produces it. We get to it by attending to the unconscious and our dreams. By attending to one’s dreams for a long time and by really taking them into consideration, the unconscious of modern man can rebuild a symbolic life. But that presupposes that you do not interpret your dreams purely intellectually and that you really incorporate them into your life. Then there will be a restoration of the symbolic life, no longer in the framework of a collective ritualistic form but more individually colored and shaped. This means no longer living merely with the reasonableness of the ego and its decisions but living with the ego embedded in a flow of psychic life which expresses itself in symbolic form and requires symbolic action.

  We have to see what our own living psyche proposes as a symbolic life form in which we can live. Hence, Jung often insists on something which he did in his own life: when a dream symbol comes up in a dominating form, one should take the trouble to reproduce it in a picture, even if one does not know how to draw, or to cut it in stone, even if one is not a sculptor, and relate to it in some real manner. One should not go off from the analytical hour forgetting all about it, letting the ego organize the rest of the day; rather one should stay with the symbols of one’s dreams the whole day and try to see where they want to enter the reality of one’s life. This is what Jung means when he speaks of living the symbolic life.

  The anima is the guide, or is even the essence of this realization of the symbolic life. A man who has not understood and assimilated his anima problem is not capable of living this inner rhythm; his conscious ego and his mind are not capable of telling him about it.

  In the variation from another part of Germany that I mentioned last time, the frog is not transformed into the beautiful woman who appears at court; on the contrary, she appears in a frog shape in the upper world, whereas in the lower world she is a beautiful girl. There is also a final test; namely, the frog calls out: Umschling mich (embrace me) and versenk dich (immerse yourself ). Versenken implies the action of lowering something into the water or into the earth. But it also means—especially when it is reflexive, sich versenken—to go into deep meditation. It is an expression used in mystical language. Naturally it depicts going down into your inner water or earth—or abyss—going down into your inner depths.

  The frog anima makes this mysterious call, and Dummling understands it. He embraces the frog and jumps with her into the pool, and in that moment she transforms herself into a beautiful woman, and they come out together as a human couple. If we take that quite naively, we can say that Dummling has to follow her into her kingdom, accepting her way of life. She is a frog and jumps constantly into the water, swimming in it and enjoying it. If he embraces her and jumps with her into the water, then he accepts her frog life. So it can be said that the bridegroom follows the bride into her home instead of the other way around. Through his acceptance of her as a frog, she is transformed into a human being. Acceptance of the frog and the frog’s life implies a jump into the inner world, sinking down into inner reality and there we come again to the same thing—that the anima’s intention is to convert rational consciousness to acceptance of the symbolic life, sinking into it without any buts, criticisms, or rational objections but with a gesture of generous acceptance, saying, “In the name of God, whatever happens, I will jump into it and realize it.” And that needs courage and naiveté. It means the sacrifice of the intellectual and rational attitude, which is difficult for women, but much more difficult for a man because it goes against his conscious tendencies, especially those of modern Western man.

  When the anima becomes human, it is a meeting of the opposites: he goes toward her and so she comes up toward him. We always see that if the tension between the conscious situation and the too-low level of unconscious contents is too great, any gesture toward one side generally improves the other as well. Very often a man will dream, for instance, that his anima appears as a prostitute, or something like that, and he will say that she is too low down, that he cannot go as far as that; it is against his ethical principles. Generally, if someone overcomes such stiffened prejudices and makes a generous gesture toward the lower part of his personality and impulses, suddenly there is a change and the anima comes up onto a higher level. One should not, however, tell people that, for it would lessen the merit of the sacrifice which has to be made, courageously and absolutely without calculation. If one has such courage and truthfulness, then generally the miracle happens that this so-called low part of the personality, which has only been banished to that state by the haughtiness of the conscious attitude, comes up onto a human level.

  There is a third version of our story which has a short continuation and a different form of the redemption of the frog lady, which also throws new light on what Jung means by the symbolic life. This is the Russian version of our story and is called “The Frog Daughter of the Czar.”28

  There was a czar and his wife. There were three sons, and they were like falcons, beautiful young men. One day the czar called them together and said, “My sons, my falcons, the time has come for you to find wives.” He told them to take their silver bows and copper arrows and shoot them into foreign lands, and at whatever door the arrow fell, there each should find his bride. Two arrows fell into other czars’ courts, and those men found relatively nice women. But Ivan Czarevitsch’s arrow fell into a nearby swamp and there he found a frog with the arrow. He said, “Give me back my arrow.” The frog replied, “I will return the arrow, but only on condition that you marry me.” So Ivan Czarevitsch returned to the court and cried and related what had happened. The czar said, “Well, that’s your bad luck, but you cannot get out of that; you must marry the frog.” So the eldest son married a czar’s daughter, the second son a prince’s daughter, and the third son the green frog from the swamp.

  In this story many things are different because there is a feminine influence at the court, so the king is not at all hostile to marriage with a frog; there is not such tension between male and female, or between acceptance and nonacceptance of frog life. But naturally Ivan is very unhappy. Then one day the czar wants to see which of his daughters-in-law can weave the most beautiful towel. Ivan goes home and cries, but the frog hops after him and tells him not to cry but to lie down and go to sleep and it will be all right. As soon as he is asleep she throws off her frog skin and goes out into the yard and calls and whistles. Her three maids and servants appear and weave the towels. When Ivan wakes up, they are given to him by his frog-wife, who has again assumed her frog skin. Ivan has never seen such towels in his life, and he takes them to the court and everybody is deeply impressed. Then there is another test as to who makes the best cake, and this is again made in the night while Ivan is asleep. The czar then tells his sons to come on a certain day with their wives to a dinner party. Ivan again goes home crying, but the frog-bride says he should not worry but should go on ahead. When he sees rain beginning to fall, he will know that his wife is washing. When the lightning comes, he will know that she is putting on her dress for the court. When he hears thunder, he will know that she is on the way. The dinner party begins and the two other wives are there beautifully dressed. Ivan is very nervous. A terrific thunderstorm begins. They all mock him and ask where his bride is. When the rain starts
he says, “Now she is washing,” and when there is lightning he says, “Now she is putting on her court dress.” He does not believe it and is in despair, but when it thunders he says, “Now she is coming.” And at that moment a beautiful coach with six horses arrives, and out of it steps a most beautiful girl—so beautiful that everyone becomes quite silent and shy.

  At the dinner table the other two daughters-in-law notice something very strange, for the beautiful girl puts a part of her food into her sleeves. The other two brides think it very odd but that it may be good manners, and they do the same thing. When the dinner is over there is music and dancing. The former frog-girl dances with Ivan Czarevitsch and is so light and dances so beautifully that she hardly seems to touch the floor. As she dances she waves her right arm and out of it falls a bit of the food, which is transformed into a garden with a pillar in it. Around this a tomcat circles, then climbs up it and sings folk songs. When it comes down it tells fairy tales. The girl goes on dancing and makes a gesture with her left hand, and there appears a beautiful park with a little river in it and on the river, swans. Everybody is as astonished at the miracle as if they were little children. The other sisters begin to dance, but when they throw out their right arm, a bone comes out and hits the czar on the forehead, and when they fling out the left arm, water shoots into his eyes.

  Ivan looks in amazement at his wife and wonders how out of a green frog there could emerge such a beautiful girl. He goes into the room where she slept and sees the frog skin lying there. He picks it up and throws it into the fire. Then he goes back to the court and they go on amusing themselves till morning, when Ivan goes home with his wife.

  When they get home his wife goes to her room and cannot find her frog skin. At last she calls out and asks Ivan if he has seen her dress. “I burnt it,” says Ivan. “Oh, Ivan,” she says, “what have you done? If you had not touched it, I would have been yours forever. But now we must separate—perhaps forever!” She cries and cries, and then says, “Good-bye! Seek me in the Thirtieth Czar’s Kingdom, in the Thirtieth Strange Kingdom, where there is the Baba Yaga, the great witch, and her bones.” And she claps her hands and changes into a cuckoo and flies out of the window.

  Ivan grieves bitterly. Then he takes his silver bow and fills a sack with bread, hangs bottles over his shoulder, and goes on his long quest. He walks for many years.

  He meets an old man who gives him a ball of thread and tells him he should follow it to the Baba Yaga. Then he spares the life of a bear, a fish, and a bird. He gets into all sorts of difficulties, but the fish and falcon and bear help him, and finally, at the end of the world in the Thirtieth Kingdom, he comes to an island on which there is a forest and in it a glass palace. He goes into the palace and opens an iron door, but nobody is inside; then he opens a silver door, but there is nobody in the room, so he opens a third door made of gold, and behind this door sits his wife combing flax. She looks so woebegone and careworn that she is dreadful to look at. But when she sees Ivan she falls on his neck and says, “Oh my beloved, how I have longed for you. You have arrived just in time. Had you come out just a little later, you might perhaps never have seen me again.” And she cries for joy. Although Ivan does not know whether he is in this world or the next, they embrace and kiss. Then she changes herself into a cuckoo, takes Ivan under her wing, and flies back. When they arrive home she changes again into human form and says, “It was my father who had cursed me and had given me to a dragon to serve for three years, but now I have paid the penalty.” So they came home and lived happily together and praised God, who had helped them.

  In our Russian version, instead of jumping through the ring, the anima figure performs this fantastic magic with the food which she puts into her sleeve and transforms into the garden with the tomcat who sings songs and tells fairy tales and the paradise which she creates with her left hand. In this way you see even more clearly that the anima creates the symbolic life, for she transforms ordinary food for the body into spiritual food through creating art and mythologial tales; she restores paradise, a kind of archetypal world of fantasy. The tomcat represents a nature spirit which is the creator of folk songs and fairy tales. It also shows the close connection of the anima with man’s capacity for artistic work and with the fantasy world. A man who represses his anima generally represses his creative imagination.

  Dancing and creating a kind of fata morgana, a fantasy world, is a similar motif to jumping through the ring. It is still another aspect of creating the symbolic life, which one lives by following up one’s dreams and day fantasies and the impulses which come up from the unconscious, for fantasy gives life a glow and a color which the too-rational outlook destroys. Fantasy is not just whimsical ego-nonsense but comes really from the depths; it constellates symbolic situations which give life a deeper meaning and a deeper realization. Here again, the two other figures take this too concretely. Just as the peasant women could not jump through the ring but broke their legs, here they put food in their sleeves for wrong motives, for ambition, and accordingly fall short.

  But then there is something else: Ivan makes a mistake by burning his wife’s frog skin. This is a most widespread motif to be found in completely different connections in many other fairy tales. The anima first appears in an animal skin, either as a fish or a mermaid, or, most frequently, as a bird, and then she turns into a human being. Generally her lover keeps her former animal skin or bird garment in a drawer. The woman has children and everything seems to be all right, but unfortunately either the husband insults his wife one day, calling her a mermaid or a goose or whatever she was before, and she rushes to her old garment, puts it on again, and disappears, and either he has to go on a long quest to find her again, or she disappears forever and he dies. In such stories one feels that it would have been better if the man burnt the skin, because if she finds it, she disappears in it. But here it is just the opposite. He burns the skin, which would seem to be all right, and it is wrong again! In other fairy tales—for instance, the Grimms’ tale called “Hans the Hedgehog,” the animal skin is also burnt. A prince has been cursed and turned into a hedgehog and the bride’s servants burn the hedgehog skin, and that frees him and he gives thanks for being redeemed. So the burning of the animal skin is not in itself necessarily destructive; it depends on the context.

  We never learn in our story why the burning of the skin causes the wife to fly away. We can imagine that because of her father’s curse she must still go into the night and atone for her sins, and since that is interrupted, the punishment becomes more definite. But this is speculation; the story gives no explanation. The fairy tales in which the animal skin is successfully burned belong to the many rituals of transformation by fire. In most mythological accounts, fire has a purifying and transforming quality and is therefore used in many religious rituals. In alchemy fire is used—as some texts say, literally—to “burn away all superfluities,” so that only the indestructible nucleus remains. Consequently, the alchemists burn most of their substances first, destroying what can be destroyed. That which resisted fire was looked on as a symbol of immortality—the solid kernel which survives destruction. Fire is therefore the great transformer. In certain Gnostic texts fire is also called the great judge because it judges, so to speak, what is worthy of survival and what should be destroyed. In its psychological meaning, where it generally stands for the heat of emotional reactions and affects, all that applies too. Without the fire of emotion no development takes place and no higher consciousness can be reached, which is why God says, “Because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth” (Rev. 3:16). If someone in analysis is dispassionate about it and does not suffer—if there is neither the fire of despair nor hatred nor conflict nor fury nor annoyance nor anything of that kind—one can be pretty sure that not much will be constellated and it will be a “blah-blah” analysis forever. So the fire, even if it is a destructive sort of fire—conflicts, hatred, jealousy, or any other affect—speeds up the maturi
ng process and really is a “judge” and clarifies things. People who have fire run into trouble, but at least they try something, they fall into despair. The more fire there is, the more there is danger of the destructive effects of emotional outbursts, of all sorts of mischief and devilry, but at the same time this is what keeps the process going. If the fire is extinct, everything is lost. That is why the alchemists always said one must never let one’s fire go out. The lazy worker who lets his fire go out is just lost. He is the person who only nibbles at analytical treatment but never goes into it wholeheartedly. He has no fire, and therefore nothing happens. So the fire is really the great judge and determines the difference between the corruptible and the incorruptible, between what is relevant and what is irrelevant, and therefore in all magical and religious rituals fire has a sacred and transforming quality. In many myths, however, fire is the great destroyer; sometimes a myth depicts the destruction of the world by fire. Those dreams in which whole towns are burned down or your own house is burned down as a rule indicate an already existing affect that has become completely out of control. Whenever an emotion overruns one’s self-control, then comes the motif of the destructive fire. Have you ever, in a state of affect, done horrible, irremediable things? Haven’t you ever written a letter that you would give anything not to have written? Or said something because of which you could bite out your tongue? Perhaps you have done destructive things through emotion—something you cannot mend, something ruined forever, a relationship with another human being destroyed. Last but not least are the declarations of war—often made in a state of affect—and then the destruction does lead to a world conflagration. Destructive affect, as one knows from mass phenomena, is exceedingly infectious. Someone who drops the reins and gives way to destructive emotion can generally pull in many other people, and then there occur those terrific mass outbursts in which people are lynched or shot—all due to a sudden fire of affect getting loose. There you see, literally, the fearful destructiveness of the fiery emotion; you find it also in psychotic constellations, where underneath a rigid surface terrific emotions are piled up. An outburst is often represented as a huge conflagration in which everything is destroyed; then the individual gets into a state of excitement, becoming so dangerous to himself or others that he has to be interned.