The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Marie-Louise von Franz

result of lectures given at C. G. Jung Institute. intention “to open up the archetypal dimension of fairy tales to the students.” pg vii

Jungian method of interpretation

example of pit falls that interpreters fall into according to MLvF:

“I would nevertheless like to express a very personal opinion here. In many so-called Jungian attempts at interpretation, one can see a regression to a very personalistic approach. The interpreters judge the hero or heroine to be a normal human ego and his misfortunes to be an image of his neurosis.” … “But such interperters ignore what Max Lüthi found to be essential for magical fairy tales, namely, that in contrast to the heroes of adventurous sagas, the heroes or heroines of fairy tales are abstractions — that is, in our language, archetypes. Therefore, their fates are not neurotic complications, but rather are expressions of the difficulties and dangers given to us by nature. In a personalistic interpretation, the very healing element of an archetypal narrative is nullified.” (viii) ex: hero child is abandoned. “If one then interprets his fate as the neurosis of an abandoned child, one ascribes it to the neurotic family novel of our time” but if we leave it general, then it takes on a deeper meaning “leaves it embedded within its archetypal context”…the abandoned and ignored becomes important from humble beginnings (ex: birth of Christ in a stable)

ix She also makes the point that it’s not the archetype that defines a story. If two stories have the same archetype encounter but the motifs are different, say one has a character that is obedient and the other story has the same character only disobedient and cheeky, the stories are different. “one cannot interpret both fairy tales in the same way, despite the fact that both stories circle around the same archetype of an encounter with the Great Mother” MLvF speaking of Russian fairy tale “Beautiful Vassilissa” (ends positive note, kind obedient) and the German “Frau Trude” (ends on negative note, cheeky character)

Jung and archetypes (wikipedia)

Some background wikipedia information:
An archetype is an original model of a person, ideal example, or a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned, or emulated; a symbol universally recognized by all. In psychology, an archetype is a model of a person, personality, or behavior.

In philosophy, archetypes since Plato at least, refer to ideal forms of the perceived or sensible things or types.

… “mother figure” may be considered an archetype and may be identified in various characters with otherwise distinct (non-generic) personalities.

Archetypes are likewise supposed to have been present in folklore and literature for thousands of years, including prehistoric artwork. The use of archetypes to illuminate personality and literature was advanced by Carl Jung early in the 20th century, who suggested the existence of universal contentless forms that channel experiences and emotions, resulting in recognizable and typical patterns of behavior with certain probable outcomes. Archetypes are cited as important to both ancient mythology and modern narratives, as argued by Joseph Campbell in works such as The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

The origins of the archetypal hypothesis date back as far as Plato. Jung himself compared archetypes to Platonic ideas. Plato’s ideas were pure mental forms, that were imprinted in the soul before it was born into the world. They were collective in the sense that they embodied the fundamental characteristics of a thing rather than its specific peculiarities.

Jungian archetypes

The concept of psychological archetypes was advanced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, c. 1919. In Jung’s psychological framework archetypes are innate, universal prototypes for ideas and may be used to interpret observations. A group of memories and interpretations associated with an archetype is a complex, e.g. a mother complex associated with the mother archetype. Jung treated the archetypes as psychological organs, analogous to physical ones in that both are morphological constructs that arose through evolution.^[3]

Jung outlined five main archetypes;

• The Self, the regulating center of the psyche and facilitator of individuation
• The Shadow, the opposite of the ego image, often containing qualities that the ego does not identify with but possesses nonetheless
• The Anima, the feminine image in a man’s psyche; or:
• The Animus, the masculine image in a woman’s psyche
• The Persona, how we present to the world, usually protects the Ego from negative images (acts like a mask)

wikipedia (German) Max Lüthi

Couldn’t find much on Max Lüthi… I’ll have to look through my other books that mention him for a general overview.

Auto translated from German:

Max Lüthi

aus Wikipedia, der freien Enzyklopädie

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Between 1928 and 1935 Lüthi studied Germanic, History and English Literature at the Universities of Bern, Lausanne, London and Berlin, where he bears in his final year of secondary school examination. From 1936 he is head teacher of German at the Zurich private school. In Bern, he graduated in 1943 with the work of the gift in a fairy tale in the saga. 1968 he is professor of European folk literature at the University of Zurich, 1979, he is retired.

wikipedia Bruno Bettelheim

Bruno Bettelheim

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bruno Bettelheim
Born	August 28, 1903 Vienna, Austria
Died	March 13, 1990 Silver Spring, Maryland, United States, (aged 86)
Citizenship	United States
Nationality	Austria
Fields	psychology

Bruno Bettelheim (August 28, 1903 – March 13, 1990) was an Austrian-born American child psychologist and writer. He gained an international reputation for his views on autism and for his claimed success in treating emotionally disturbed children.

[…]

Among numerous other works, Bruno Bettelheim wrote The Uses of Enchantment, published in 1976. In this book he analyzed fairy tales in terms of Freudian psychology. The book won the U.S. Critic’s Choice Prize for criticism in 1976 and the National Book Award in the category of Contemporary Thought in 1977. Bettelheim discussed the emotional and symbolic importance of fairy tales for children, including traditional tales at one time considered too dark, such as those collected and published by the Brothers Grimm.

After Bettelheim’s suicide (1990) it emerged that he had falsified some of his academic credentials. At the same time, a number of his former patients came forward with accusations of neglect. Bettelheim’s posthumous personal and professional reputation suffered considerably as a result.^[2]

Background

[…]He earned a degree in philosophy, producing a dissertation on Immanuel Kant and on the history of art.

In the Austrian academic culture of Bettelheim’s time, one could not study the history of art without mastering aspects of psychology.^{[citation needed]} Candidates for the doctoral dissertation in the History of Art in 1938 at Vienna University had to fulfill prerequisites in the formal study of the role of Jungian archetypes in art, and in art as an expression of the Freudian subconscious.

Though Jewish by birth, Bettelheim grew up in a secular family. After the merging of Austria into Greater Germany (April 1938), the authorities sent him with other Austrian Jews to Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps for 11 months from 1938 to 1939. In Buchenwald he met and befriended the social psychologist Ernst Federn. As a result of an amnesty declared for Hitler‘s birthday (April 20, 1939), Bettelheim and hundreds of other prisoners regained their freedom. Bettelheim drew on the experience of the concentration camps for some of his later work.

Life and career in the United States

[…]

The University of Chicago appointed Bettelheim as a professor of psychology and he taught there from 1944 until his retirement in 1973. He had trained in philosophy, but stated also that the Viennese psychoanalyst Richard Sterba had analyzed him.

Bettelheim also served as Director of the University of Chicago‘s Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, a home that treats emotionally disturbed children. He made changes and set up an environment for milieu therapy, in which children could form strong attachments with adults within a structured but caring environment. He claimed considerable success in treating some of the emotionally disturbed children. He wrote books on both normal and abnormal child psychology and became a major influence in the field, widely respected during his lifetime.

In The Uses of Enchantment (1976), Bettelheim suggested that traditional fairy tales, with the darkness of abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapple with their fears in remote, symbolic terms. If they could read and interpret these fairy tales in their own way, he believed, they would get a greater sense of meaning and purpose. Bettelheim thought that by engaging with these socially-evolved stories, children would go through emotional growth that would better prepare them for their own futures.

[…]

At the end of his life Bettelheim suffered from depression. He appeared to have had difficulties with depression for much of his life.^[1] In 1990, widowed and in failing health, he committed suicide.^[2]

Controversies

Political controversy

^[…]

[edit] Theoretical controversy

Initially Bettelheim believed that autism did not have an organic basis, but resulted when mothers withheld appropriate affection from their children and failed to make a good connection with them. The most extreme expression of this concept suggested that mothers literally did not want their children to exist. Bettelheim also blamed absent or weak fathers. One of his most famous books, The Empty Fortress (1967), contains a complex and detailed explanation of this dynamic in psychoanalytical and psychological terms. He derived his thinking from the qualitative investigation of clinical cases.^{[citation needed]} He also related the world of autistic children to conditions in concentration camps. In A Good Enough Parent, published in 1987, he had come to the view that children had considerable resilience and that most parents could be “good enough” to help their children make a good start.^[6]

Personal controversy

In addition to reassessment of Bettelheim’s psychological theories, controversy has arisen related to his history and personality. He had a prominent reputation as a compassionate man who had made a career of healing others and as an expert on the dynamics of the concentration camps.

After Bettelheim’s suicide in 1990, detractors^[who?] claimed that Bettelheim had a dark side. They alleged that he exploded in screaming anger at students, and went beyond firm treatment to corporal punishment or child abuse.^{[citation needed]} Three former patients^[who?] questioned his work and characterized him as a cruel tyrant. Other former patients^[who?] wrote or spoke publicly to tell how much Bettelheim had helped them, so there seemed to be no consensus.^[7]

Two biographies published in the 1990s revealed evidence that Bettelheim had lied about or exaggerated many parts of his background. These included wartime experiences, family life, academic credentials and the use of corporal punishment at the Orthogenic School. While Richard Pollak’s biography^[8] expressed a strongly negative view of Bettelheim, that by Nina Sutton^[9] offered a different interpretation of some of the material. Gaps emerged between the public reputation Bettelheim had established in the US and some of the facts revealed during this controversy, but some commentators made charges that related to Bettelheim’s personality.^[1][7][10]

The resulting discussions and controversy called into question^{[citation needed]} whether the University of Chicago had screened Bettelheim closely enough, although appointments to administrative positions such as director of the school do not require an academic appointment. Many parents^[who?] who had children at the school claimed that his treatment had helped their children and continued to consider him a compassionate man.^{[citation needed]}

Bettelheim on the impact of bodily experience

According to Bettelheim, children — when treated with loving care — will internalize the care and love experienced in childhood respecting their bodies and their own person.^{[citation needed]} The loving attitude of the parents towards the body of their child and its actions will transform into the child’s holding its own body in high esteem, wishing to care and protect it.^{[citation needed]}

Popular culture

In 1974 a four-part series featuring Bruno Bettelheim and directed by Daniel Carlin appeared on French television — Portrait de Bruno Bettelheim.

Woody Allen included Bettelheim as himself in a cameo in the film Zelig (1983).

A BBC Horizon documentary about Bettelheim was screened in 1986.^[11]

Two former patients wrote about their experiences at the Orthogenics School, one in a novel and one in a memoir. Tom Lyons’ novel The Pelican and After appeared in 1983. Stephen Eliot’s brought out his memoir, Not the Thing I Was: Thirteen Years at Bruno Bettelheim’s Orthogenics School, in 2003.

wikipedia Maria Tatar

Maria Tatar

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Maria Tatar is a American academic whose expertise lies in children’s literature, German literature, and folklore.^[1][2] Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Chair of Folklore & Mythology at Harvard University.^[2] She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.^[3]

wikipedia Jack Zipes

Jack Zipes

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Jack David Zipes is an American retired Professor of German at the University of Minnesota, who has published and lectured on the subject of fairy tales, their linguistic roots, and argued that they have a “socialization function”. According to Zipes, fairy tales “serve a meaningful social function, not just for compensation but for revelation: the worlds projected by the best of our fairy tales reveal the gaps between truth and falsehood in our immediate society.” His arguments are avowedly based on the neo-Marxist critical theory of the Frankfurt School.

Zipes enjoys using droll titles for his works like Don’t Bet on the Prince and The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Ridinghood.

He completed a PhD in comparative literature at Columbia University. Zipes taught at various institutions before heading German language studies at the University of Minnesota. He has retranslation of the complete fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.

wikipedia entry on Marie-Louise von Franz

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Marie-Louise von Franz
Born	January 4, 1915 Munich
Died	February 17, 1998
Nationality	Swiss
Fields	Psychology

Marie-Louise von Franz (January 4, 1915 – February 17, 1998), the daughter of an Austrian baron and born in Munich, Germany, was a Swiss Jungian Psychologist and scholar. In her native Switzerland, she was known by a pet form of her Christian name, Malus ^[1]. She worked with Carl Jung, whom she met in 1933 and knew until his death in 1961. It was Jung who encouraged her to live with fellow Jungian analyst Barbara Hannah, who was 23 years von Franz’s senior. When Hannah asked Jung why he was so keen on putting them together, Jung replied that he wanted von Franz “to see that not all women are such brutes as her mother,” and also stated that “the real reason you should live together is that your chief interest will be analysis and analysts should not live alone.”^[2] The two women became lifelong friends.

Von Franz founded the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich. As a psychotherapist, she is said to have interpreted over 65,000 dreams, primarily practising in Kusnacht, Switzerland. Von Franz also wrote over 20 volumes on Analytical psychology, most notably on fairy tales as they relate to Archetypal or Depth Psychology, most specifically by amplification of the themes and characters. She also wrote on subjects such as alchemy, discussed from the Jungian, psychological perspective, and active imagination, which could be described as conscious dreaming. In Man and his Symbols, von Franz described active imagination as follows: “Active imagination is a certain way of meditating imaginatively, by which one may deliberately enter into contact with the unconscious and make a conscious connection with psychic phenomena.”^[3]

Von Franz, in 1968, was the first to publish that the mathematical structure of DNA is analogous to that of the I Ching. She cites the reference to the publication in an expanded essay Symbols of the Unus Mundus, published in her book Psyche and Matter.^[4] In addition to her many books, Von Franz recorded a series of films in 1987 titled The Way of the Dream with her student Fraser Boa ^[5].

Carl Jung believed in the unity of the psychological and material worlds, i.e., they are one and the same, just different manifestations. He also believed that this concept of the unus mundus could be investigated through research on the archetypes of the natural numbers. Due to his age, he turned the problem over to von Franz.^[6] Two of her books, Number and Time and Psyche and Matter deal with this research.