Redemption Motifs in Fairy

by Marie-Louise von Franz

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0919123015
• ISBN13: 9780919123014
• Release Date: January 1980
• Publisher: Inner City Books
• Length: 124 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.9" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Bewitchment and Healing

Steven B. Herrmann, PhD, MFT Author of "Walt Whitman: Shamanism, Spiritual Democracy, and the World Soul" This is one of the most fascinating books on fairytales I have ever read! In this book von Franz is clearly at her best. What I find most helpful is what she has to say about bewitchment. By "bewitchment" she means the experience of being overtaken by what C. G. Jung called a complex and its archetypal core. Typically the subject who has become "bewitched" has been possessed by something larger, evil, and toxic, often in early childhood or latency. To be "bewitched" means that "a particular structure of the psyche is crippled or damaged in its functioning and the whole is affected." To become free of bewitchment through Jungian psychotherapy, the object-imagoes of the complexes need to be projected onto an analyst, then re-collected as inner psychological structures belonging to the patient, whether a child, adolescent, or adult, who is the projector. This is the only way, von Franz asserts that "the value or the energy invested in the image can flow back to the individual, who has need for it in his development." For instance, when the toxic core of the negative mother complex is projected onto an analyst, who becomes the carrier of the Witch archetype, we find, as we do in fairytales, the condition where some character in the story or dream, or some functional complex in the patient's object relations, has been "cursed or bewitched and through certain happenings or events in the story is redeemed. This is a very different condition," Von Franz says, "from the Christian notion of redemption." Sometimes the Witch functions together as a pair, as in "The Wizard of Oz." From an analytic standpoint, von Franz writes "any archetypal complex, any structural unity of the collective unconscious psyche can be cursed or bewitched." Bewitchment is made translucent in von Franz's masterful analysis of the story of Hansel and Gretel, where a latency-aged boy and his little sister are companioning together towards overcoming a psychological state of distress. Their father, a poor woodcutter has been "bewitched" by a famine in the land; he has been put under a spell by the children's evil step-mother who has power over him and tricks him into abandoning his biological children. As Von Franz says, Hansel and Gretel presents an answer to the problem of bewitchment. The solution comes by way of a feminine wisdom-ethic, an ethical teaching that reveals clearly how a person might dissolve the complexes that are poisoning her psyche; first, by finding a suitable hook to hang her projection on, then, by recollecting and integrating something of the Witch's trickster-like characteristics, as an aspect of her own personality. Both father and step-mother are possessed by Evil in the story. The "redemption motif" is latent in the pattern of the two companioning siblings that are faced together--as hero and heroine--with the problem of redeeming the

Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales

There is no doubt this woman is a genius. However, there is one statement somewhere in the book which assumes the American Indian is on a concrete level of cognition. I had to then assume she was prejudiced against them, based on my belief they had very spiritual beliefs and a love of nature. Besides this bothersome referral, I found the book useful for the possibility of utilizing fairy-tales for therapy. There are references in the index to the actual stories. Sincerely, Teresa O'Connor, M.A.