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| Late afternoon sun through the woods across from our house: 2/28/14 CC Jean Stimmell |
Theodor Seifert, a Jungian analyst in
Stuttgart Germany, believes that fairy tales tap into the vast richness of our
collective unconscious, representing hard-won wisdom accumulated over time
since the dawn of our species, working in concert with the more-than-human
wisdom of the earth itself.
Seifert, like most Jungians, views
the various characters in a fairy tale, not as different people but as
different universal aspects of our individual psyche. Therefore, to him, a
fairy tale is a metaphor for the drama that plays out between these various parts during the course of our life.
As such, fairy tales can teach us
crucial, life-affirming lessons. For instance in his book about Snow White,
Seifert shows us how this fairy tale is really about meeting ourselves in all
our forms – “from self-reflection to self-criticism to self destruction” and
then goes on to tell us why this is of the utmost importance to us today:
“Today we are in a position to
annihilate ourselves completely, as global self-destruction is an acutely
threatening possibility. Will we escape it? I believe …fairy tales as
embodied here in Snow White – can show us alternatives, alternatives that must
be chosen by the individual.
With the individual begins the
transformation that can progress from the one to the many. If we find and honor
our own inner earth, the planet earth will also again become something like our
mother, which in fact it always has been.”*
* Snow White: Life
Almost Lost by Theodor Seifert. Chiron Publications. 1986: page 118
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