Archetypal Symbols in Fairytales: The Profane and Magical Worlds.

Hot off the press!

Archetypal Symbols in Fairytales: The Profane and Magical Worlds by Marie-Louise von Franz.

The first Volume of the collected works of the High Priestess of Analytical Psychology (classical Jungian), Marie-Louise Von Franz. She will rock you right outta your thinking socks. This giant book is absolutely gorgeous with an illustrated hardcover and is out on my beloved Chiron Publications. She covers a wide array of profane and magical symbols! If you think you know how to analyze fairytales then this book will devastate you in the most terribly, amazing, and awe-ful ways. The gnosis of fairy tales, similar to dreams, is a sense hard won. It is a learned science, a specific hermeneutic practice. The fairy tale has you, you don’t have it. In my personal work, complexes, especially the inherited (collective) ones, are uniquely worked through via fairy tales. Like myth and other folktales, fairy tales, when not taken literally, reveal the nearly inarticulable magic of the imaginal psyche and its warnings. Fairytales help to bring the nearly formulated and unformulated complexes to consciousness. If you can’t get over the superficial qualm of princes marrying princesses, then this kind of hermeneutics isn’t for you. If you can put your judgements to the side, you may be surprised what you find!

The greatest warning from Von Franz on the superficial approach to this science: “When people have sniffed a little whiff of Jungian psychology, they may be worse than if they knew nothing, for they take a fairytale and a few Jungian concepts and pin those on to the figures, e.g. the ego, anima, self. This is worse than no interpretation for it is not objective, it’s infantile, and even dishonest, because in order to be able to pin these concepts onto such a being, you are obliged to twist the story if unaware. If you are careful, you will see that these concepts cannot without restriction be used for fairytales...” they (fairytales) are not for the individual, e.g. the anima as that of a man, but rather for that of the whole group of people from which they stem and thus the individuation of that group.

Books mentioned:

Archetypal Symbols in Fairytales: The Profane and Magical Worlds by Marie-Louise Von Franz