Jung and the Fairy Tale or Nosce te Ipsum

The fairy tale or folk tale is the most widespread and possibly oldest form of litera­ture: an un­pre­tentious, dreamy type of story, without an identifiable author, recounting miraculous events that are set in some indefinite place and time. Simple as they may seem, fairy tales are not always easily accessible to a sophisticated audience. In our (post)modern times they have more or less disappeared from sight. ‘Enlightened’ minds in the past have tried to suppress them and have succeeded to the extent that fairy tales are looked upon, nowadays, as infan­tile material, appre­ciated only by the very young, or perhaps by the occasional romantic soul. In our modern, no-nonsense world of career management and clever marketing strategies, fairy tales do not count for much. Yet, fairy tales are valuable repositories of wisdom. Freud did not hesitate to analyze E.T.A. Hoffmann’s literary fairy tale Der Sandmann in order to illustrate his psycho­analytic theory of the uncanny. And Jung-oriented research tends to value fairy tales even more.