Tales and Soul

by Richard Reeve on January 12, 2010

in AziMuth

“Fairy tales present images of soul. For this reason it is recommended that when reading a fairy tale you not give yourself over to immediate critical reflection. Do not allow yourself to be irritated by seemingly “impossible” absurdities – for example, the transformation of a frog into a prince in “The Frog King.”. Rather, open yourself again to the world of these images and give yourself over to their effect on you. They speak for themselves…” Theodor Seifert, Snow White, Life Almost Lost, pg. vii.

As I journey along the various boundaries of the unconscious, I find the above advice to be not only fitting for reading fairy tales, but for encountering the wider life that Jung has coined the symbolic life.

Such a perspective has the powerful and unsuspecting ability to challenge our strict modern consciousness with an inversion that at first can be startling. The world again comes alive with the beautiful colors of the imaginal.

The following maps this wider inversion analogically: “Fairy tales, then, do not depict individual life histories or experiences; rather, these life experiences can be fitted effortlessly into the structure of fairy tales.” ibid, pg. vi.

Where will you find some inversion today? And what question have you for the mirror, mirror on the wall?


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  • Interesting post and wonderful advice. If I'm reading it right, approach the world with an innocent eye (to borrow a term from art) be open to the possibilities that the world presents. It's tricky to not try and mould the world to our expectations and experiences but rather to comprehend these things on their own terms, as they are. This calls to mind for me Plato's analogy of the cave in which all in our world is but a representation (symbol) of the ideal and that we need to work to understand this and shed our learned preconceptions.
  • That's an interesting take which accurately captures a thinking
    approach to the dilemma... My gut, or feeling approach to the same
    quandary tells me that psyche wants to unfurl through us, in both
    directions as it were, from the inside out and from the outside
    in...whose eyes and whose seeing do we claim? Or perhaps is there a
    claim upon them which we fail to honor? As the Hunter lyric puts it,
    "wake up and find out that you are the eyes of the world." Such a
    perspective is rife with the danger of inflation, but properly
    inherited, it's an entirely different world...
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