Fairy tale
Society, customs, states and languages change - but fairy tales do not become obsolete and we still read them to children. Such a long lifespan of these plots is explained by the fact that they symbolically reflect the most important psychological problems of people - our archetypal inner conflicts.
Fairy tales touch on family relationships (e.g. rivalry between siblings) and personal problems (breaking out of childhood dependence, self-affirmation, awareness of one's own merits). Parents are sometimes afraid of legendary violence and cruelty, modern children's literature often tries to avoid everything terrible and sad.
Scary stories should not be abandoned: by staging the child's unconscious fears, they help him to recognize and overcome them. Light literature, purified of suffering and cruelty, only teaches the child to hide his fear.
The richness of the symbolic content of fairy tales makes them excellent material for analysis.
Fairy tales are a direct reflection of the mental processes of the collective unconscious and therefore, in terms of their value for scientific research, they surpass any other material. In fairy tales, archetypes appear in the simplest, purest and most concise form, thanks to which archetypal images give us the key to understanding the processes taking place in the collective psyche. In myths, legends or other more detailed mythological material, we understand the basic structural formations of the human psyche and comprehend them through cultural layers.
According to CG Jung's concept, each archetype is essentially an unknown mental phenomenon, and therefore it is impossible to translate the content of the archetypal image into the language of thought in any satisfactory way. The best way in this case is to try to describe it either on the basis of one's own psychic experience, or on the basis of data from comparative studies in which the whole chain of associations surrounding the archetypes becomes clear, so to speak. Thus, the fairy tale itself is its best explanation, and its meaning lies in the totality of the motifs that are united by the course of the fairy tale's development.
In the blog I will describe examples of the well-known fairy tales from the perspective of analytical psychology.