FAIRY TALES, DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY AND RE-ENCHANTING THE WORLD
Article by LiveReal Agents Courtney and Kevin
Have we forgotten something important about fairy tales?
Is our “depth psychology” becoming shallow?
Most kids (and some adults) love fairy tales.
They often touch something deep in us.
But what is that “something,” exactly?
Here’s one potential glimpse.
Countless fairy tales tell of a dragon which captures a beautiful princess and then keeps his pure and innocent prisoner captive in a castle.
The poor princess, languishing in her goal, weeps as she begs Heaven to send someone to save her.
Knights gallop up to rescue her, but one after another they are devoured by the dragon, who seizes all their wealth and then hoards it in the castle cellars.
However, one fine day, a knight rides up; he is a prince, more noble, handsome, and pure than all the others.
A witch has told him the secret by which he can conquer the dragon: she has revealed the dragon’s weakness and told him how and when he will be able to bind or wound the dragon…
So the lucky prince, well provided with weapons and information, wins the victory. He frees the princess, and then what gentle kisses they give each other! All the treasures stored in the castle for centuries are now given to the handsome prince who has triumphed because of his knowledge and his purity. The prince and princess climb onto the dragon’s back and fly all over the universe.
People often think that these fairy stories are for children only. In fact, they are Initiatic tales: in order to understand them, you need to know the science of symbols.
The dragon is the sexual force.
The castle is the human body.
The unhappy princess who has been held prisoner by uncontrolled sexual energy is the soul.
The knight is the ego or the spirit of man.
The arms he uses to conquer the dragon are the weapons of the spirit – willpower and knowledge, used to control this energy.
So then, once the dragon has been mastered, it becomes man’s servant, his mount for journeys through space, because this dragon has wings…
(Source: Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov. Line breaks added for readability.)
This touches on an area where drama intersects philosophy.
We think in philosophy, but live in drama.
Our experiences are dramatic, but our heads are philosophical.
We live, but we also have to interpret life.
The way we interpret our experience in life (or our daily drama) depends on our philosophy. (And we all philosophize, whether or not we’re aware of it.)
We interpret and understand everything based on our most basic assumptions about life – our life philosophy or worldview.
This applies to fairy tales.
Two different approaches to fairy tales can illustrate this.
Take the life philosophy of materialism, for example.
According to materialism, only physical matter is real.
It’s atheistic. Materialism claims that spirituality is ultimately an illusion.
Materialism is often reductionistic. It reduces spirituality, religion, and all of life down to mundane social dynamics, mechanical interactions, or mere by-products of physics or chemistry. It reduces individuals down to genes, brain chemistry, hormones, and societal cogs. It reduces cultures down to GDPs, tax revenues, and numbers on spreadsheets.
For devout materialists, even “souls” or even “minds” get reduced down to the point of being described as nothing but brain chemicals, genes, and biochemical hubbub.
When they apply it consistently, they eventually wind up reducing themselves.
They can do the same with fairy tales.
With a materialistic approach, even fairy tales can become mundane.
A fairy tale can get reduced down to a chronicle of relatively mundane events, smeared with a few layers of added special effects and imaginary creatures to make them seem more interesting.
But even with imaginary elements added for a sense of spectacle, mundane events can still seem meaningless and hollow – mere records of a series of experiences that have no real significance. “This happened. Then that happened. The End.”
Approaching fairy tales with a materialistic worldview can make them seem drab, routine, and lifeless, as if they’ve been robbed of their magic. It can strip something essential away, or even explicitly reject it, so what’s left is only the husk or outer shell. Or, they can become mere fantasy, completely disconnected from “the real (mundane) world.”
It can lead to a “disenchantment of the world.”
Disenchantment, when all “magic” is stripped away from the world, can lead to soft nihilism.
Soft nihilism means someone losing hope in a “happily ever after.”
It strives instead for a “comfortable enough present.”
It involves a loss of our natural, inborn idealism or hope.
It’s the organic idealism every kid seems to be born with.
We often assume we’re “evolving” or getting wiser as we go through life.
But we might also notice that, as we get older, we can sometimes seem to forget about or lose touch with something profoundly important. (The origin of the “tragedy” genre.)
Some might describe this process as living through living through The Death of God on a personal level.
It’s possible to take this approach – via a life philosophy of materialism – not only with fairy tales, but with psychology and religion as well, and with the same flattening effects.
This can be the inevitable consequence of our thinking.
Today, some of us are interested exclusively in technology and the outer, material, tangible aspects of life, and dismiss everything else as unreal.
We de-mythologize everything and then complain about life seeming meaningless.
We deconstruct all systems of meaning, and then suffer because life seems hollow and empty.
But of course, it doesn’t have to be this way.
This bleak outlook isn’t the only way to see things.
Soft nihilism isn’t inevitable.
At least to some degree, it’s a choice, even if that choice is sometimes unconscious.
It comes from a turn toward deconstruction, criticism, skepticism, and a deliberate effort to hollow out all systems of meaning and purpose.
The brief excerpt above describes a life philosophy that offers a different view.
It describes a “re-enchantment of the world.”
According to the excerpt above, fairy tales touch something deep inside us, and that “something” is real.
In this approach:
We’re all a “beautiful princess” trapped in a state of peril. That “princess” is our soul, and that state of being “trapped” is the state of our soul.
We’re also the noble and handsome prince, and we’ve been tasked with a mission: to rescue the princess.
There’s also genuine peril. Many fail to rescue the princess. We must arm ourselves with knowledge and strength to succeed in this quest.
Despite dangers, difficulties, and odds stacked against us.
But for those who sense this, avoiding it is not an option.
According to this approach, “happily ever after” is real.
Herein lies the secret formula of Star Wars, The Matrix, Titanic, The Princess Bride, dozens of Cinderella stories, and many more.
(Luke, Han, Chewie, and the gang rescue Princess Leia from the Death Star; Trinity, Morpheus, and the team rescue Neo from the Matrix (and then Neo rescues them right back); Jack and Rose rescue each other; Wesley rescues Buttercup, and so on.)
According to this perspective, these are brief glimpses of a valid spiritual process.
They’re snack-sized, vicarious tastes of spiritual awakening.
We spend billions of dollars to hear these stories, and ignore others that strip away the heart and guts of it.
(Ideas about depth psychology might seem abstract and highly speculative, but billions of dollars trading hands are hard facts that even the most literal-minded acknowledge.)
When they work, they give us a brief taste of it. Of “IT”.
They speak to our intuition that there’s more to the picture than what we see.
They remind us that this isn’t all there is.
They remind us that there really is “something more going on.”
This “something more” isn’t easy to explain.
It might – by definition – be impossible to pin down.
And maybe it always will be.
But we don’t need to restrict ourselves only to things we can pin down.
We might often sense that there’s something more that we’re missing.
We might sense that there’s something profoundly important – some critical mission – that we can and should be immersed in.
We might try to explain this mission, although the efforts often fail.
For example, we might explain it as a functional mythology, or what The Denial of Death author Ernest Becker described as a “hero project,” or what Viktor Frankl would describe as a search for meaning, or what Carl Jung would describe as a process of "individuation" involving archetypes of the collective unconscious. And so on.
The efforts to map these territories can be tricky – and confusing.
But one aspect we can be clear on: A “re-enchantment” that solves the problem of disenchantment – that transforms the world from being meaningless to meaningful – isn’t actually a “transformation of the world.” It’s a transformation of ourselves.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in
seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
- Marcel Proust
It involves "knowing ourselves" in this sense.
It might involve a dramatic transformational experience.
Or, it might involve a less turbulent process of going through a manageable existential crisis, discarding a materialistic life philosophy (as an approach that sometimes proves to be deeply unfulfilling but also untrue), and taking a better route.
This approach to self-knowledge avoids “knowing ourselves” as mere objects in the reductionistic way that flattens us down in the same way that flattens fairy tales down.
This kind of transformation involves becoming existentially fit.
It points toward a spiritual renaissance.
It can transform our daily experience of life into something more rich and meaningful.
It restores the hope for a “happily ever after” that we often crave – but also sense can cross over into everyday life.
As Ranier Maria Rilke said:
“Perhaps all the dragons of our lives
are princesses
who are only waiting to see us once
beautiful and noble and brave.”
Many of us – even if we’re adults – sense that there’s something to this – that there’s “a dream to dream.”
And maybe, to make real.