Fairy Tales and Psychology

For years psychologists have used fairy tales in an effort to understand the human mind. The connections between the two are through archetypes, id, ego, super ego, collective unconscious, and the psychosexual stages of development. Psychologists claim that the uses of fairy tales are symbolic images that reflect insight into the human unconscious. Carl Jung the father of analytical psychology interprets fairy tales by using his theories of collective unconscious and archetypes. The collective unconscious is basically an experience or memory that we all as a specie share. Archetypes are basically defined as an ideal person or personality type, examples of archetypes in fairy tales consist of wise old man, great mother nature, eternal child and the trickster. Another influential psychologist was Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. He used his theories of id, ego, superego, dreams and psychosexual stages of development to analyze fairy tales. He thought that fairy tales and dreams could possibly be derived from the same place, so fairy tales like dreams may provide insight into the unconscious. Additionally in the story of Hansel and Gretel, there is evidence of psychosexual stages of development, in the tale there are many indications of the oral stage, shown through the constant use of bread. The id, ego and superego are also visible psychological aspects of fairy tales. The id is basically the primal desires of man that do not think about morals or what is socially acceptable. An example in fairy tales would be when a family is on the brick of starvation the parents often decide to take their children out to the woods and leave them so they don’t have to share their food anymore. In these situations the family is acting primarily on the id. They ignore the ego and super ego that would tell them that that particular action is immoral. What really stood out for me in Dr. Mazeroff’s lecture would be the use of fairy tales in psychotherapy. He spoke of using fairy tales to bring out our repressed memories. One example was when he once asked a patient to recite a well known fairy tale, in doing so the patient blindly left out one key section of the tale that included the mistreatment of a child. Then when Dr. Mazeroff asked the patient why he left it out the patient realized that he himself once was mistreated as a child and he unknowingly repressed that particular memory. Since fairy tales can supposedly provide insight into the unconscious they are capable of locating and resurfacing repressed memories.