The Interpretation of Fairy Tales

by Marie-Louise von Franz

  The burning of the frog skin indicates the destructive effect of fire, but we must also take into consideration the fact that the frog is a cold-blooded animal and a water creature—water being the opposite of fire—and therefore she is a creature that dwells in moisture. That probably is another reason why application of fire to her skin is specifically destructive here. It takes away the princess’s water quality. What does it mean psychologically if a man applies destructive fire to his “moist,” creative anima? We have seen that the anima in this context—and also in practical life—represents the gift of poetic fantasy, the ability to create the symbolic forms of life. If, therefore, the hero applies fire to her skin, that would mean a too analytical, too impulsive, too passionate concern with the creative fantasy. By grabbing their own fantasies and pulling them too eagerly into the light of consciousness and by interpreting them at once with too much intensity, many people destroy their secret inner life.

  Creativity sometimes needs the protection of darkness, of being ignored. That is very obvious in the natural tendency many artists and writers have not to show their paintings or writings before they are finished. Until then they cannot stand even positive reactions. The passionate reactions of people to a painting, the exclamation, “Oh, this is wonderful!,” may, even if meant in a positive way, entirely destroy the chiaroscuro, the mystical hidden weaving of fantasy which the artist needs. Only when he has finished his product can he expose it to the light of consciousness, and to the emotional reactions of others. Thus if you notice an unconscious fantasy coming up within you, you would be wise not to interpret it at once. Do not say that you know what it is and force it into consciousness. Just let it live with you, leaving it in the half-dark, carry it with you and watch where it is going or what it is driving at. Much later you will look back and wonder what you were doing all that time, that you were nursing a strange fantasy which then led to some unexpected goal. For instance, if you do some painting and have the idea that you could add this and that, then don’t think, “I know what that means!” If you do, then push the thought away and just give yourself to it more and more so that the whole web of symbols expands in all its ramifications before you jump at its essential meaning.

  Hence, if people do active imagination in analysis, I generally only listen to it and only at the special request of the analysand, or if the fantasies are too overflowing and therefore need cutting down, or if they have already found a certain end, can one analyze them like a dream. It is much better not to analyze them while they are going on, for then the author of the fantasy becomes selfconscious and knows what it could be about, which inhibits further working of the fantasy.

  If an unconscious fantasy or another content is especially fiery, heavily laden with affect, it will push through to consciousness, no matter what. But there are certain fantasies that are more froglike; that is, they come up in the daytime as a kind of playful thought; in an idle moment you light a cigarette, and a strange fantasy comes, but without much energetic load. If you jump in a fiery way onto such thoughts, you destroy them. These, like the little creatures—the dwarfs, and such creatures—you must not look at; just let them be around you and do not disturb their secret work. Our frog-woman belongs more to this latter category of creatures because we see from her tomcat that her spirit sings folk songs and tells fairy tales, and that is an artistic, playful spirit which could be destroyed by being taken too seriously, with too much affect. That is probably why Ivan made such a big mistake in burning the frog skin. By that he delayed the definite redemption of his anima.

  That he can find her again at the end of the world is something which occurs in many fairy tales. A man meets his destined bride and by some mistake loses her again and then has to go on an endless journey into the underworld and through seven heavens to find her again. This double rhythm corresponds to what one could technically call the first apparent blossoming at the beginning of an analysis. It happens often to people who have for a long while stiffened in a neurotic conscious attitude and have therefore lost contact with the flow of life and have lost hope of getting out of their neurotic rut. When they come into analysis and receive the warm concern of another human being and through dreams a sudden contact with irrational possibilities, or if a prospective dream shows that in spite of the apparently hopeless aspect of life in consciousness there is an irrational positive possibility in the unconscious, then often, after the first hours of analysis, there comes a remarkable blossoming; the symptoms disappear and the individual experiences a miraculous healing. Never fall for that! In only five percent of the cases does it last. In all other cases, after a while the whole misery flows in again and the symptoms return. Such an initial blossoming usually occurs when the faulty conscious neurotic attitude is far away from the unconscious life tendencies, so that it is impossible to link the two sides. You first link them and things seem all right, but then both opposites stiffen again and everything falls back. Healing has really taken place only when there is a constant state of relationship between consciousness and the unconscious, not when through a relationship a spark flies over, but only when a condition of continual relationship with the other side has been established. To build that up generally takes a long time, and only then can you say that a healing cure is really solidified and safe from relapses. This first blossoming, however, is an archetypal event.

  I have often asked myself why the unconscious or nature—or whatever we want to call it—plays such a cruel trick on people by first curing them and then dropping them again. Why should one hang a good sausage under a dog’s nose and then take it away? That’s not nice. But I have seen that there is a deep meaning and probably a final intention in this. If some people had not had a brief experience and glimpse of how it could be when things are right, they would never hold on through the miseries of the analytical process. It is only the remembrance of that glimpse of paradise that makes them continue on the dark journey. This is probably one reason why sometimes, at the beginning of analysis, the unconscious offers the marvelous possibility of cure and of the right kind of life and of happiness, and then takes it away; it is as if it were to say: “That is what you will get later, but you first have to realize this and this and this, and much more, before you can get there.” I found that out practically when people who had experienced an early blossoming said, “Well, after all, I was without symptoms at such and such a time, so it should be possible, shouldn’t it?” Yes, it should be possible. And that gives them the courage to hold on in a desperate situation. In our fairy tale, if Ivan had not seen his bride in her beautiful state and had not had that relationship with her, he would certainly not have walked to the Thirtieth Czar’s Kingdom at the end of the world.

  In this story there is another interesting motif. The frog-lady has been cursed by her father for some sin she has committed. We are not even sure that it was a sin—it was probably only a sin in the eyes of her father—but she has done something which annoyed him and has been cursed and has to live in the form of a frog and be in the hands of a dragon, and Ivan must rescue her from there.

  That is complicated, if we think about it psychologically, because in our main story, “The Three Feathers,” we had assumed that the anima was in the low form of a toad because consciousness had no relationship to the feminine side. In the conscious situation there was only a king and his three sons and no feminine principle, so that the whole feminine world was repressed and existed in a degenerate form. Now here the balance of the story is completely different because at the beginning the czar has a wife; there is a mother principle—the feminine principle is not lacking in the conscious setup—and accordingly we cannot speak simply of the repression of the anima. There is another difficulty: the frog-lady has annoyed her father, about whom we do not know much, and he has cursed her and brought her into this low condition. The accompanying diagram makes it clearer. At the top there are five people instead of four, so it is a completely different setup. You could say that that is
a naturally balanced family; there is a little bit more of the male than of the female, but nothing vital is lacking. Below the threshold of consciousness are the frog-lady and her father.

  Now the father below, who is only mentioned at the end of our story, puts a negative curse on his daughter which takes her away from consciousness into the depths of the unconscious. So really her father deflects her path and prevents her coming up and being integrated, which would be the normal process in life. Why the father of the frog-lady is so bad-tempered we do not know, but he certainly seems not to want his daughter to marry on the conscious level. The only thing we can assume is that he has some reason against her becoming conscious. He wants to keep her to himself, perhaps, as fathers often do, but we do not know, and it is no good speculating about such family troubles in the unconscious. (Family troubles in the unconscious are something terrific, if you reflect.) Translated into psychological language, it means that one unconscious archetypal complex fights another archetypal complex within the unconscious. In my experience, such a conflict is generally a ricochet effect of some disturbance between the two worlds of the conscious and unconscious sphere. I assume, but I could give you other examples where it becomes clear, that the father below has a conflict-tension with the upper czar. Those two fathers fight, and instead of attacking the czar, the lower father takes his daughter away.

  Who is this father of the frog-princess? Who is the anima’s father? In many European stories in which there is a Christian influence, the father of the anima is called the devil. In European countries with less Christian influence, the father of the anima is characterized as the older image of God. For instance, in Germanic countries the anima’s father appears as an old man with a Wotanic character, in Jewish legends he is an old desert god or a demon; in Islamic fairy tales the fathers of the anima are great jinns, which means pagan demons of the pre-Islamic time. In general, therefore, the frog-princess’s father would represent an older image of God which is in contrast to, and repressed by, the new dominant God-image. The new ruling dominant of consciousness usually superimposes itself on an older image of the same kind, and often there is still a secret tension between these two factors. That is what makes the anima diverge in this way.

  This is important in practical life also; for example, we often see that a man’s anima is an old-fashioned being. She is frequently bound to the historical past, and this explains why men who in conscious life are courageous innovators, inclined toward change and reform, become sentimentally conservative as soon as they fall into an anima mood. They can be amazingly sentimental; for example, a thoroughly ruthless businessman who thinks nothing of ruining people will sing childhood songs under the Christmas tree, as if he couldn’t hurt a fly. His anima has remained in the traditional world of childhood. You can see the same thing in the area of Eros—for instance, the belief in institutions held by some men. This too is an anima effect. With such beliefs men are strongly bound to the past. Women, who are known to be more conservative in their conscious lives (which accounts for the statement that they would still stir the soup with a stick if men had not invented a spoon), often have an animus with an eye to the future and a talent for effecting changes. This is often seen in women’s interest in new movements. In ancient Greece, the Dionysian cult was for the most part picked up first by women and carried out by them. Then again, the early Christian communities were mainly carried by the enthusiasm of women, not men.

  When the old God-image binds the anima to the past, then naturally a rift opens up between the new conscious attitude and the older layer, where the anima comes from. So there is a germ of truth in the contention that the telling of fairy tales belongs to the paganism of the past, as the Grimm Brothers said. According to the Russian story, the frog-princess is the fairy tale teller, and she cannot quite come up to the realm of the ruling czar. The real conflict is between the two father figures. This is something one often meets with if there is a conflict in the unconscious; that is, one unconscious content hits some other content in the unconscious, and instead of hitting back, the other content hits still another one, and so there is an indirect effect. This is illustrated by the famous story of the lady who scolds the cook, who shouts at the kitchen maid, who kicks the dog, who bites the cat—and so on. The conflict is passed on and then comes up in a completely different realm, and you do not know where the real conflict lies. This is why one must always look at the parallels and at the whole context to find out the deeper connections. They sometimes lead into unfathomable depths, such as here, where it is a question of the image of God. In our main German story it is a question of wrenching the anima away from the depths of the earth—the womb of Mother Nature—while in the Russian story she also has to be liberated from a dark negative father god. But we will stop here and continue discussing the methods of interpretation.

  7

  SHADOW, ANIMA, AND ANIMUS IN FAIRY TALES

  Though nearly all fairy tales ultimately circle around the symbol of the Self or are “ordered” by it, we also find in many stories motifs which remind us of Jung’s concepts of the shadow, animus, and anima. In this chapter I will give the interpretation of an example of each of these motifs. But we must again realize that we are dealing with the objective, impersonal substructure of the human psyche and not with its personal individual aspects.

  The figure of the shadow in itself belongs partly to the personal unconscious and partly to the collective unconscious. In fairy tales only the collective aspect can occur—the shadow of the hero, for instance. This figure appears as a shadow-hero, more primitive and more instinctive than the hero but not necessarily morally inferior. In some fairy tales, the hero (or heroine) has no shadow companion but displays in himself both positive and negative traits, sometimes demonic traits. We must ask, therefore, in what psychological circumstances does the hero-image split into a light figure and a shadow companion. A division of this sort often occurs in dreams in which an unknown figure appears for the first time, and the split indicates that the approaching content is only partially acceptable to consciousness. Becoming conscious of something presupposes a choice on the part of the ego. Generally only one aspect of the unconscious content can be realized at one time, the other aspects being rejected. The shadow of the hero is therefore that aspect of the archetype which has been rejected by collective consciousness.

  Even though the shadow figure in fairy tales is archetypal, from its characteristic behavior we can learn a great deal about the assimilation of the shadow in the personal realm. In order to illustrate this, I shall take the Norwegian story “Prince Ring.”29 Although collective, this tale provides analogies to the individual problem of the integration of the shadow and shows what features of this process are typical and general.

  Prince Ring

  Ring, the son of a king, while out hunting one day was captivated by the sight of a fleet hind with a golden ring around her horns. Wildly pursuing her, he became separated from his companions and rode into a thick fog in which he lost sight of the hind. Slowly he made his way out of the wood and came to a beach where he found a woman hunched over a barrel. Approaching, he saw the golden ring lying in the barrel, and the woman, guessing his desire, suggested that he take the ring. As he reached into the barrel, he found that it had a deceptive bottom, so that the deeper he reached, the farther away the ring appeared to be. When he himself was halfway down, the woman flipped him in, made the cover secure, and rolled the barrel into the surf. The outgoing tide bore him away.

  After a very long time the barrel was washed ashore, and Ring climbed out on a strange island. Before he had time to get his bearings, a huge giant had picked him up out of curiosity and carefully carried him home as company for his giant wife. These old giants were very affable and deferred to the king’s son’s every wish. The giant freely showed the youth his treasures, only forbidding him to enter his kitchen. Prince Ring felt an immense curiosity to know what was in the kitchen and twice was on the verge of entering but s
topped himself. The third time he had the courage to look, and a dog called out several times, “Choose me, Prince Ring! Choose me!”

  After some time the giants, knowing that they would soon die, told Ring that they were about to depart this life and offered to give him anything he chose. Ring recalled the dog’s urgent plea and asked for what was in the kitchen. The giant was not well pleased but consented. The dog—called Snati-Snati—leaped up wildly in his joy at being with Ring, and the prince was a little afraid.

  They journeyed to a kingdom on the mainland, and Snati-Snati told Ring to ask the king for a small room where he might spend the winter as a guest of the palace. The king welcomed him, but the brow of Rauder, his minister, grew dark with jealousy. Rauder pressed the king to hold a contest wherein he and the new guest would cut down trees to see who could make the biggest clearing in the forest in a single day. Snati-Snati urged Ring to get two axes, and they both began the task. By evening Snati-Snati had felled half again as many trees as the minister. Then, at Rauder’s urging, the king ordered Ring to kill two wild bulls in the forest and return with their skins and horns. In the encounter Snati-Snati came to the aid of Ring, who had been knocked down, and ferociously killed the bulls. He stripped them of their skins and horns, which he brought to the castle, and Ring was greatly lauded for the deed. Next Ring had to recover the three most precious objects, objects now in the possession of a family of giants in a nearby mountain: a golden suit of clothes, a golden chessboard, and shining gold itself. If he could retrieve these, he might then marry the king’s daughter.