What they tell us … fairy tales

Did you know that Cinderella and her envious sisters are first mentioned in the pages of an ancient Chinese manuscript that is three thousand years old? Society, customs, states and languages ​​are changing – but fairy tales do not become obsolete, and we still read them to children. Such a long life of these plots is explained by the fact that they symbolically reflect the main psychological problems of people – our archetypal internal conflicts.

Fairy tales touch on family relationships (for example, rivalry between brothers and sisters) and personal problems (getting out of a child’s dependent position, self-affirmation, awareness of one’s own merits, experiencing the Oedipus complex) – this is discussed by the American psychologist Bruno Bettelheim in the book “The Benefits of Magic: Meaning and meaning of fairy tales. Parents are sometimes frightened by fabulous violence and cruelty, modern children’s literature often tries to avoid everything terrible and sad.

“Scary tales should not be abandoned: by staging the child’s unconscious fears, they help him to realize them and overcome them,” says Jungian analyst Stanislav Raevsky. “Little literature, cleansed of suffering and cruelty, only teaches the child to hide his anxiety.”

The richness of the symbolic content of fairy tales makes them excellent material for analysis. Freudian psychoanalysts are interested in identifying the repressed layers of our unconscious, which are reflected in this or that fairy tale.

For example, they believe that in the English fairy tale about Jack, who grew a beanstalk to the very sky, killed a giant in the sky and took possession of his treasure, the unconscious desire of a teenager to “kill his father” and thus assert his masculinity is expressed in symbolic form. Jungian analysts see in this tale rather a story about initiation, the achievement of personal integrity.

“From the point of view of analytical psychology, any fairy tale symbolically describes an internal process, and not external events or relationships with other people. The heroes of the fairy tale are interpreted as different components of one personality, the relationship between which leads to transformation and personal growth, ”explains Jungian analyst Yulia Kazakevich.

Both of these interpretations are not mutually exclusive, but there is a third: as in many other fairy tales, Jack simply shows the children by his example that any difficulties can be overcome with the help of intelligence and ingenuity.

The universal nature of fairy tales makes it possible to use them in psychotherapy. According to Stanislav Raevsky, “a fairy tale helps the psychotherapist and his client to speak the same language, gives a common system of symbols. Sometimes you can understand a lot just by asking a person what his favorite fairy tale is.

“It is also important how exactly a person tells his favorite fairy tale,” Yulia Kazakevich adds. — Everyone will place accents in his own way, add or remove details that are significant for him. The next step is to write your own story. It is no coincidence that the birth of the author’s, literary fairy tale historically precedes the emergence of psychoanalysis. A literary tale is a transition between a folk tale and those tales that each of us can write for ourselves, trying to understand the complexity and inconsistency of our inner world.

Children and adults, we return to fairy tales again and again, thus reuniting with ourselves, helping to awaken the child that is hidden in each of us, revealing the power of our own imagination that can transform us and our lives.

“Donkey skin”

The king, having lost his beloved wife, is looking for a new wife who would be in no way inferior to the deceased, and falls in love with his own daughter. The princess, following the instructions of the fairy godmother, escapes from the palace, disguised as a donkey skin. Before meeting the handsome prince, she lives in poverty far from her native kingdom.

Taboo incest. This is perhaps the least known of all Charles Perrault’s tales: it deals with the most severe taboo in existence. The desire for incest, ascribed by the plot to the king, is a projection of any girl’s attraction to her father, which is at the same time a natural stage of growing up.

The heroine of the fairy tale overcomes her anxiety, refusing, on the advice of a fairy, from an easy life. In a foreign kingdom, she lives in the mud, grazes cattle, which symbolically conveys the difficulty of understanding incestuous attraction. Only by accepting her dark side (which includes incestuous experiences) does the princess gain the right to enter into a “correct” marriage. Dressing up in the skin of an animal is a symbol of magical transformation: the girl manages not only to save her soul, but also to reach a new level.

“Little Red Riding Hood”

The most beautiful girl in the village is sent by her mother to her grandmother. In the forest, she meets a wolf who eats first her grandmother, and then the girl. Few people know that the original (1697) version of Charles Perrault ends here – we are more familiar with the version with a happy ending, where the hunters kill the wolf, cut open his stomach, and the girl and grandmother are safe and sound.

Sexual temptation. In this famous tale, the sexual meaning is most directly expressed. The red color symbolizes sexual experiences. The wolf is, of course, a man: when the girl undresses and goes to bed with him, and the beast tells her that he has such big hands to hug her tighter, there is no room for doubt.

Not satisfied with the unambiguity of these images, the author also considered it necessary to provide the tale with advice: girls do not need to listen to the insidious speeches of men. According to the moral norms of the time, this tale says that sexuality is dangerous, equates male sexuality with aggression, and female sexuality with sacrifice.

Little Red Riding Hood, unlike other fairy-tale heroines, does not grow up, and remains a girl. It is no coincidence that we stubbornly supplement this tale with the transformation that Perrault lacks (the “second birth” of a grandmother and granddaughter from the ripped up belly of a wolf).

“Cinderella”

Widowed, a rich man marries a woman with two evil daughters. They mock Cinderella until the prince falls in love with her at the ball. There are many versions of this tale, including those of the Brothers Grimm. The famous glass slipper appears in Charles Perrault’s version.

Family rivalry. The rivalry of children because of parental love has always existed, this is a completely normal phenomenon. Cinderella’s life seems exaggeratedly difficult to us – and yet the fairy tale reflects the emotions of any child who has brothers or sisters, as well as the feelings that he has for his parents. The image of the evil stepmother allows the child to admit his “bad” experiences (anger and resentment towards parents), without feeling guilty. The stepmother and her evil daughters take away the father from Cinderella – he takes care of them, and not of his own child.

From the point of view of internal processes, the story of Cinderella is the story of the realization of desires, which, unlike the desire to get a beautiful dress or a trip to the ball, can never be satisfied by the father. These desires are repressed, as symbolized by Cinderella’s submissive position, as dirty as the ashes on which she sits or sleeps, and blossom (aimed at the right object) after the hard work of awareness and acceptance.

“Snow White”

The stepmother is jealous of Princess Snow White because she is more beautiful than her. Snow White is taken to the forest to be killed there, but released, and she takes refuge in the house of the seven dwarfs. Her stepmother finds her and, disguised as an old woman, gives her a poisoned apple. Snow White will only come to life when the prince kisses her.

Difficulties in puberty. The Brothers Grimm brought to us a fairy tale that describes with unusual accuracy the most important stage in the development of a girl – the period of puberty. At the beginning of the plot, the queen mother (she later dies during childbirth) pricked her finger. Three drops of blood fall on the snow – this emphasizes the contrast between innocence and sexuality. So the fairy tale prepares the girls to receive menstruation.

Further: in the deep forest, among the gnomes – characters devoid of sexuality – Snow White grows up. With them, she rehearses motherhood (but so far without a man), learns to manage the household. Performing all the functions of a woman, except for sexual and reproductive, she becomes ready for the arrival of the prince.

Finally, this tale speaks of the nascent rivalry between mother and daughter. The image of an evil stepmother, of course, symbolizes an ordinary, fairy-tale mother, who is envied by a growing girl. The poisoned apple embodies the excessive maternal love, her omnipotence and fear of punishment, which the girl needs to realize and overcome in order to turn from a child into an adult. This is also a reminder to the mother that it is time to rebuild the relationship with her daughter, recognizing her right to choose her own path. The blood of the first menstruation is a signal of this.