look at the picture of this french journalist..and ask yourself one question:

why would you want it freed?

of course, they’re letting bob geldof run around amok, so it isn’t too surprising I suppose.

I have found another aspect of Jungian thinking that I really don’t like. It has to do with the psychological interpretation of fairy tales. And I really shouldn’t completely blame psychology for this, because Vladimir Propp and the categorization of fairy tales helped psychologists do this. But at least Propp never sunk to the level of ‘this means this, and that means that’

Von Franz in her book interpreting fairy tales, and again in Animus and Anima in fairy tales, tells us about the constructs of the unconcscious evidenced in the stories she uses as examples. Now, normally I love fairy tales, but her examples felt flat.

And that’s when I realized that depth psychology takes everything special in a fairy tale, things that make it special for the people telling and hearing it, things that may not make sense but give it life and colour, these things are taken out. All that is left is a hook, that each different culture may have used.

Instead of a wicked stepmother, or an evil queen, or a witch in the middle of the forest, descriptions of which are given in the stories, what depth psychology does is boil it down to their language. It isn’t a stepmother, it’s the model of the great mother archetype; it isn’t the evil queen, it’s the feminine aspect of the dominant culture; it isn’t the witch, it’s the anima rising up in the man.

depth psychology is rewriting fairy tales from many different cultures into their own dead and formless language…language that doesn’t evoke any feelings whatsoever. That’s what is dangerous in depth psychology, even so much that those within the field warn about it all the time, they warn about allowing one side to become more dominant than the other in the thinking. In this case, logic vs. feeling.

It appears that depth psychology has wandered off the proverbial path with no bread crumbs, ignoring its own warnings.

or should I say wandered into the unconcious with no way to reconnect with the world?