The Art of Fairy Tales
by Sofia Skavdahl

“In fairy tales are embedded the most infinitely wise ideas that, over the centuries, have refused to be shorn, worn down, or killed off. The most imperishable and wise ideas are gathered together in the silvery nets we call stories. Since the first fire, human beings have been drawn to mystical tales. Why? Because they all point to a single great fact—that is, although the soul on its journey may stumble or become lost, it will ultimately find its heart, its divinity, its strength, its Godly pathway through the dark woods again—no matter that it may take several episodes of “two steps forward, and one step back” in order to discover and retrieve such.”  — Clarissa Pinkola Estés  [1]

While fairy tales are often dismissed as children’s literature, they are as rich in meaning and wisdom as any sacred text, and they in fact serve an incredibly important psycho-spiritual purpose. First told orally by people who likely could neither read nor write, fairy tales have survived for thousands of years and wrestle with the same dilemmas found in the gospels. Like Christ’s parables, their characters are almost exclusively archetypal, lacking in names and any kind of excessive identification. This is not a coincidence, for the use of archetypes touches a deeper aspect of one’s psyche, the very place where healing and transformation can happen. Despite their frequent mention of long lost kings and queens, the prevalence of talking animals, and the use of symbols that seem trite in the modern day; fairy tales illustrate rather bluntly what is required to bring one’s psyche into a state of greater balance, offering hundreds of examples of how to find one’s way after losing it. 

I often think that if someone wants to know what does not work— that is, what does not lead to any experience of lasting peace, love, or healing— they can read the news, or frankly, watch almost any program on popular media. There is little evolution in popular culture, only the same circular stories about the wielding of power and prestige and the hollow pursuit of wealth. Though we might be entertained by these stories, they are disingenuous and have little value where the soul is concerned. Fairy tales, on the other hand, do not lie. They are honest about the fact that the dark needs to be dealt with. Their wisdom revolves around the same timeless themes: naivety leads to betrayal (“Cinderella”, “Snow White”), if you make a deal with the devil it will eventually be need to be paid “(Rumplestiltskin”, “The Girl with No Hands”), the cost of an addiction (“The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces”), and the risks of rejecting our shadow (“The Pied Piper of Hameln”). They show it is not through wealth, nor status, nor a sense of personal importance that the heroes and heroines of these stories meet their happy endings, but only through the acceptance and overcoming of their unique challenges do they change their fate.

Although psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung often gets the credit for discovering the relevance of fairy tales as they relate to one’s individual psychology, it was really his pupil and eventually colleague Marie-Louise von Franz who did the exhaustive work of showing the powerful role these stories can play in examining one’s personal psychology. In her book, An Introduction to the Interpretation of Fairy Tales, she wrote:

“all fairy tales endeavour to describe one and the same psychic fact, but a fact so far complex and far-reaching and so difficult for us to realize in all its different aspects that hundreds of tales and thousands of repetitions with a musician’s variations are needed until this unknown fact is delivered into consciousness; and even then the theme is not exhausted. This unknown fact is what Jung calls the Self, which is the psychic totality of the individual and also, paradoxically, the collective unconscious.” [2]

The Self was the term Jung used to describe the divine energy within each individual, the part of you that seems to know who you truly are, beneath your adaptations and persona. The Jungian Analyst and writer James Hollis often says that there is something inside of you that knows you better than you know yourself. This something seems to subtly know what you need beyond the surface of the ego and orients one towards healing, often contradicting the mind’s agenda. In his collected works, Jung even went as far as to say that the Self might as well be called “the God within us.” [3] If the Self is the persistent, unraveling thread in every fairy tale, then within these stories lie the instructions for discovering one’s true nature. Fairy tales do not mince words, they are clear about what works. 

After von Franz, the other great godmother of fairy tale interpretation, Marion Woodman, said:  

“Reading ancient myths and fairy tales can be very helpful because these stories came spontaneously from people who had not studied psychology. The stories came straight out of their unconscious and, therefore, show us how the unconscious works unimpeded by conscious intervention. The images are clear and stark. For those of us who are interested in why we do what we do when we want to do the opposite, the stories are gold mines of information.” [4]

Though part of the magic of stories is that one can be passive, not necessarily needing to do anything to experience the psychic renewal they bring; interpreting a fairy tale is a powerful exercise that lends incredible insight to the workings of one’s psyche for two primary reasons. The first is that the act of interpretation is a deeply powerful art form that is available to everyone, a tool that helps our suffering find meaning and eventual relief. Interpretation is different from analysis, which is generally more scientific and interested in measurable outcomes. When one interprets a story, a dream, or a personal experience, the key is that one does not find themselves taking a reductive stance, wholly confident that this means that; but that they discover an insight that allows for fluidity and experience a different way of seeing the circumstances of one’s life.  

The second reason fairy tales are so helpful is that they give images to unseen psychic processes and provide possible context to the mystery of healing. One works with a fairy tale as they would a dream, taking all the characters in the story to be portraying different energies in one individual psyche. This means that within all of us there is a king, a queen, a messenger, a frog prince, a sleeping princess. The task of the conscious mind is, when possible, to bring all these energies into balance. At the start of each fairy tale there is always an imbalance, something that is not working and creating a problem for the psyche, often symbolized by the state of the kingdom. The opening predicament in a fairy tale is always an excellent indicator of what kind of transformation will need to take place for a greater state of wholeness to occur. 

There are a few terms I wish to clarify before including a brief excerpt of my own fairy tale interpretation of the old Grimm’s tale, “Rapunzel”. By psychic wholeness, I am referring to the state of the psyche where it is in balance and relatively accepting of itself. This suggests that the individual is not constellating in extreme opposites, operating on one-sided beliefs like “I am good” versus “I am bad,” or “I am wounded” versus “I am perfect.” As the Roman playwright Terence said, “nothing human is alien to me,” meaning we all possess the same propensities for good and evil. Jung believed that the psyche strives for balance, which is why the sacred marriage is such an important symbol in folklore. The union at the end of a story suggests the psyche has undergone important processes that have now led to a more whole state of being.  

Fairy tales show us the effect of having one’s masculine and feminine energies out of balance. By masculine and feminine, I am not referring to gender, but to the archetypal energies that exist within every person. In fairy tales the state of the soul is often indicated by the feminine characters and the ego consciousness by the masculine. While the feminine corresponds to our emotional worlds, feeling states, and creativity, the masculine often represents the state of the logical mind, one’s organizing faculties, and ability to bring the feminine into form. When these energies fail to be in harmony with one another, neurotic symptoms tend to arise and put the psyche into a state of distress as opposed to balance. This blending of energies is a lifelong task. The happily ever after at the end of the fairy tale does not suggest that psycho-spiritual development is over, but that meaningful growth has taken place. 

Many of the terms used in fairy tale interpretation, like the Self, the unconscious, anima, and animus, were psychological concepts coined by Jung. These certainly have their usefulness, as Jung gave language to phenomena that previously had none in 20th century psychology. But, I find the excessive use of these terms to be confusing, and aim for my interpretations to land more in the realm of the artistic as opposed to psychological. By numinous, I am referring to an encounter that is transpersonal, sacred, and lays evidence to God. I have found that it is almost always the numinous character or symbol in a story that brings the lucky break. 

Releasing Rapunzel

The story of “Rapunzel” begins with a man and woman who desperately long for a child. This is a familiar motif in fairy tales, one that suggests psychic infertility. The woman looks out her tiny window all day, pining for the herb rapunzel, developing what seems to be an insatiable appetite. Right away, we are alerted to the fact that there is something amiss with the feminine energy of the psyche, the part that is generative and conducive to new life. The rapunzel she is craving resides in a sorceress’s garden beyond a high wall. The woman is driving herself crazy and complains to her husband that if she does not eat some rapunzel, she will die. Two of the most important aspects of the feminine—to create new life and nourish oneself— are sorely missing. There is something to be said about how the woman is craving something that for whatever reason, she is not able to cultivate herself. 

The undernourished feminine is a widespread condition found in both men and women. This is not a coincidence, but the direct result of a world that has been exclusively ruled by the masculine, and the dysfunctional masculine at that. The feminine realm of the soul, feelings, dreams, and creativity is not seen as very productive in the majority of societies, and regarded as secondary to the masculine values of logic and order. Though we do need the masculine energy to bring anything worthwhile into form, when the masculine is unbalanced and operating without the feminine, it is not able to be effective. The masculine in this tale is desperate to appease the feminine but seems to be neither aware nor willing to do the work required to grow their own rapunzel and so he resorts to stealing. We could say that the masculine is not yet strong enough to bring the dream of the psyche into being, and so the psyche resorts to “living” through the abundance of another. When the sorceress catches him, he makes a very poor bargain and promises to give away his first born child. 

The severely wounded feminine often manifests outwardly as an addiction, implied by the compulsive nature of the woman’s appetite. The relief of the addictive substance or behavior brings relief, for a moment, but it is superficial relief. The ravenous appetite for rapunzel is symbolic of the soul's hunger for something deeper, but since neither the feminine nor the masculine figure seem to be conscious of this, the rapunzel becomes the projected solution. The conflict at hand is really one of power, as the woman’s appetite for rapunzel has so much energy that it dominates the rest of the psyche. When an addictive complex has hold of one’s psyche, there is little energy left for anything else, especially new life. 

Since we understand this story to be illustrative of all the energies in one individual psyche, the introduction of the sorceress is a shadow character within oneself, representative of all the qualities that one has yet to consciously claim. She is symbolic of the negative feminine, the constellated opposite to the child Rapunzel. Looking at the two of them, we see the extremes of the feminine played out: the powerful and the powerless, the beautiful and the banished. The negative feminine locks the soul, as seen in the child Rapunzel, up in a tower when she is 12 years old. Like her birth mother, Rapunzel has only a tiny tower to view the world, suggesting she too is on a path of secondhand living, at least until she consciously intervenes to change her fate. Her notable hair that lifts the sorceress up, suggests the unconscious relationship she has to her own femininity, which has been possessed by the shadow. It is no wonder that she will have to lose it for any meaningful change in her circumstances to occur. 

This is the key conflict of the story and perhaps in many of our lives. 12 is that fateful age where one generally undergoes a loss of innocence and childhood dreams start to slowly die. It is the age where the heart starts to be burdened by reality and the true nature of the soul is often shunned. In the fairy tale, it is the sorceress that keeps Rapunzel from real life. Though this is a role that many mothers can unconsciously act out with their children, this dynamic is commonly at play in plenty of adult’s psyches. The sorceress within sabotages the soul’s potential by keeping it locked inside. 

The psyche is stuck in its conditioning and will need an outsider to bring about any meaningful change, which is where the prince comes in. The prince represents the new masculine energy that will have to develop in order to bring the psyche into a greater state of wholeness. He is Rapunzel’s first reintroduction to the outside world and he is a positive masculine figure, differing from the immature one seen in her father. The prince sees the soul’s nature and celebrates it, he desires to bring her out into the world. Rapunzel, delighted that someone has seen such value in her, receives the confidence she needs to agree to leave the tower. It is at this point that her hair has served its purpose, after finally securing a connection to the outside world, suggesting her feminine energy is on the road to becoming conscious. She is beginning to restore the relationship with herself. 

But alas, it is not so simple, as both Rapunzel and the prince have psychic work to do. Witnessing the soul and its gifts is not enough on its own. The sorceress needs to be dealt with, it takes time for the energy within the psyche to be redistributed away from complexes and addictions. What takes moments in a fairy tale might take months or years in our own lives. After the sorceress banishes Rapunzel and injures the prince, we learn that both Rapunzel and the prince spend several years wandering through the wilderness apart and alone. The ego needs time to strengthen and the soul needs prolonged nourishment. The prince is wounded, but it is his blindness that creates the numinosity that is needed for healing to occur. Similarly, it takes significant humbling for the ego to adapt to the ways of the soul. By the end of the fairy tale, the original masculine and feminine energies as seen in Rapunzel’s mother and father have been completely transformed, perhaps symbolized by the birth of twins. Rapunzel’s tears of joy restore the prince’s sight, and it is as if the psyche is seeing itself and all its potential, for the very first time. It is still the same psyche and world we were in, after all. Only now, we have the chance of living our own life. [5] ✧