Imagine you are a child, snug in bed. Outside, night is falling. Your mother is telling you the story of Cinderella. Images of the wicked stepmother and her evil daughters dance in your head. Or maybe you’re with Jack, climbing a beanstalk, or plotting against Rumpelstiltskin, the evil gnome.

Fairy tales have enchanted us for centuries, originating from oral traditions that arose early in human history. The tales about campfires vastly differed from the animated movie versions in which time-honored stories have been reinvented as entertainment to satisfy current cultural appetites. Rarely do we as adults return to the fairy tales of our youth. However, if you are reading this post, psychology is on your mind, and you may share my belief that the old tales in their undiluted form offer insight into a range of human predicaments.

In his lifelong study of the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind, Swiss psychiatrist and depth psychologist Carl Jung used fairy tales in his psychoanalytic practice to expose a patient’s inner struggles. The images in fairy tales, Jung believed, illustrated inner states of being and gave form to what was unspeakable in a person’s life. A discussion of sleeping beauty in her glass coffin might spark a patient’s revelation about feeling “dead to life.” Hansel and Gretel’s story might bring up forgotten feelings of abandonment.

For Jung, dreams, fairy tales, and myths offered information about oneself and the world hidden from the conscious mind. Dreams, fairy tales, and myths conveyed archetypal motifs and patterns that spoke directly to a person’s creative imagination. In fairy tales, recurring themes such as death and rebirth, orphanhood, confrontation with evil, transformation, loss and renewal resonated with personal wounds.

As modern people immersed in a material world, we tend to overlook how we also experience symbols in our daily lives. A shoe may be protective outerwear for a foot, but it may also symbolize a certain class or be an object of desire. Symbols stimulate responses that propel action. A swastika is a symbol, as is a cross, as is a smiley face, as is a wedding band. Symbols also populate fairy tales and dreams. Have you ever felt that what you experienced in life resembled a fairytale? Have you ever felt lost and abandoned in a strange place? Which beanstalk are you climbing and why?

We are creative, imaginative, and feeling creatures. How we read and respond to symbols activates emotions. If we pay attention to images that provoke strong feelings, we know we are at a portal to deeper self-knowledge.

There have been several recent studies exploring how fairy tales can be useful in therapeutic practice. In 2014, researchers at the University of Bologna explored group therapy workshops with 21 women experiencing adjustment disorders. Participants spent five sessions discussing female heroines and charming princes, “Cinderella’s revenge” (i.e., how to discover and use inner resources inside every woman), the couple in fairy tales, and symbolic meaning. In the final two workshops, participants were asked to create a fairy tale as a group using the structure: initial stressful event, test, tasks, help, fight, victory, final reward. At the end of the intervention, participants reported increased personal growth and self-acceptance and decreased levels of anxiety.[1]

In her wonderful article, “The Use of Fairy Tales in Psychotherapy,” Bette u. Kiernan, MFT, describes how patterns from family therapy systems recur in fairy tales and observes “The families in fairy tales resemble the families who most often seek psychotherapy. Often the fathers are absent or ineffective; there are stepmothers who are cruel, raging, lacking in empathy, and even murderous; and siblings are jealous, demeaning, and emotionally abusive. Typically, fairy tale families scapegoat one member of the group: witness the case of Cinderella.”[2]

Are you curious to explore how fairy tales might be a playful and creative way toward greater self-knowledge? One way is to do this is to use the framework of Internal Family Systems, IFS, and consider each character in the story as a “part.” IFS conceives of every human being as a system of protective and wounded inner parts led by a core Self. IFS therapy supports the idea that we have internal families within us and some of the subpersonalities are wounded and some healthy, but all are good.These parts, however, are not static; they can and do heal and change.[3]

Please read “The Fisherman and His Wife,” by the Brothers Grimm. Consider each character in the story as an aspect of yourself. What are five words to describe the fisherman? What feelings does he illicit? What words describe his wife? What feelings does she bring up? What does the fish symbolize to you? Do you identify with one character over another? Which character do you feel closer to? Is one more sympathetic than another? How would you rewrite the fairytale? What have you learned about yourself from the exercise?

[1] Ruini, C., Masoni, L., Ottolini, F. et al. Positive Narrative Group Psychotherapy: the use of traditional fairy tales to enhance psychological well-being and growth. Psychology of Well-Being 4, 13 (2014).

[2] Kiernan, Bette U., MFT, “The Uses of Fairy Tales in Psychotherapy.” May 7, 2005 Betteconsulting.com

[3] Internal Family Systems Therapy, Psychology Today

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at Transcending the Past.

If you found this post interesting, you may also want to read “The Fear of Abandonment: Missing Mothers and Fairy Tales,” “Dream Disturbances: The Healing Function of Bad Dreams,” and “Write Your Own Fairy Tale.”

Keep up with everything Dale is doing by subscribing to her newsletter, Exploring the Unknown in Mind and Heart.

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One of my earliest and most frightening memories is the time I became separated from my mother in one of last century’s massive department stores. I must have let go of her hand, or she mine; which one of us wandered off I will never know. I looked around, and suddenly, inexplicably, she was nowhere in sight. I felt pure terror. In the busy aisles, unfamiliar adults brushed passed me with cold impassive faces.

Abandonment is one of our primal fears. For nine months, we inhabit our mother’s body, completely dependent on her for life-giving essentials. When the umbilical cord is cut, we become separate beings, unmoored from our source. Unlike other primates, at birth we are helpless and dependent.[1] Humans develop self-sufficiency at a slower pace than our primate cousins and remain immature longer than most. Without an attentive caregiver, our early existence is precarious.

Before Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, speculated that separation from our mothers at birth is the central trauma of our lives[2], European philosophers, among them Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre, theorized that fear of abandonment is a major component of modern consciousness. What they understood — the existential nature of our anguish, despair, and aloneness — we now embrace as a condition of our post-modern psyches.

Long before these renowned thinkers espoused their theories, our foremothers sat around a fire exchanging wisdom tales. P.L. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins series, shares her literary detective work: “When a woman is the chief character in a story, it is a sign of its antiquity. It takes us back to those cloudy eras when the world was ruled not, as it was in later years, by a god but by the Great Goddess.”[3]

Maternal mortality, dying while giving birth or thereafter, must have been high on women’s lists of ever-present dangers to their lives. Medical historians Van Leberghe and Debrouwere estimate that maternal mortality could have been as high as 25% in prehistoric times.[4] In traditional societies, a solicitous maternal presence insured safety, security, survival. Her absence could be catastrophic, often presaging an arduous struggle for her offspring for food, shelter, and love.

Common wisdom often comes down to us through folk and fairy tales. So it is not surprising that the tragic event of a mother’s death or absence, due to separation or illness, found its way into them. These cautionary tales illustrated the challenges an orphaned child might encounter after such a grievous loss: loneliness, poverty, despondency, victimization by revenge, competition, jealousy, envy, greed. The tales don’t just depict these woes, some were maps to transformation, from naïve and untested young girls to brave, self-sufficient young women. For heroes, the transformation required a warrior stance, slaying the enemy or killing the monster. But for heroines, the prescription was the deployment of charm, wit, cunning, generosity, kindness, gratitude, and respect for nature. Remedial attributes and virtues, rather than sheer courage and brawn, secured her success over malevolent forces.

Many well-known tales begin with a mother’s death. Most often, though not exclusively, stories about mothers and daughters start in this manner. (“Cinderella” and “Snow White” are the best-known examples in the United States.)

In fairy tales, as in dreams, the opening event presents the initial situation or predicament that sets the story’s action rolling. “Vasilisa The Beautiful,” a Russian tale, begins with these words:

In a certain Tsardom, across three times nine kingdoms, beyond high mountain chains, there once lived a merchant. He had been married for twelve years, but in that time there had been born to him only one child, a daughter, who from her cradle was called Vasilisa the Beautiful. When the little girl was eight years old the mother fell ill, and before many days it was plain to be seen that she must die. So she called her little daughter to her, and taking a tiny wooden doll from under the blanket of the bed, put it into her hands and said:

 

“My little Vasilisa, my dear daughter, listen to what I say, remember well my last words and fail not to carry out my wishes. I am dying, and with my blessing, I leave to thee this little doll. It is very precious for there is no other like it in the whole world. Carry it always about with thee in thy pocket and never show it to anyone. When evil threatens thee or sorrow befalls thee, go into a corner, take it from thy pocket and give it something to eat and drink. It will eat and drink a little, and then thou mayest tell it thy trouble and ask its advice, and it will tell thee how to act in thy time of need.” So saying, she kissed her little daughter on the forehead, blessed her, and shortly after died.

The death of the mother precipitates the daughter’s journey to find her way in a seemingly cruel world. Bereft of a tender, caring maternal presence, sorrow and woe besiege the grieving child, a trope much more common in stories about a daughter’s loss of her mother than a son’s. In both cases, the abandoned child must “grow up,” that is, become her own true self; but the masculine-identified child is encouraged to take immediate action, while the feminine-Identified child is encouraged to suffer through the hardships. However, the tales also indicate that without the initial difficulty, abandonment, the heroine would not be required to discover her courage, self-respect, self-worth, and maturity.

In some tales, the mother figure is not dead but metaphorically “missing.” She is emotionally neglectful, passive, or narcissistic and inadequately loving, like the mothers of “Rapunzel” and “Hansel and Gretel.” Or she is beholden to her male counterpart. The consequences of having this type of mother are just as devastating as if she had died.

What do we make of all the wicked stepmothers? The frequency with which they appear indicates a truth about human wholeness. No person is all-good, all-giving, all-knowing. No human is without anger, jealousy, greed, what Carl Jung called the repressed shadow, the split-off and unacceptable aspect of our psyches. In the tales, the negative qualities society rejects are projected onto the figures of the wicked stepmother, the witch, and the hag.

Woe to him who thinks to find a governess for his children by giving them a stepmother! He only brings into his house the cause of their ruin. There never yet was a stepmother who looked kindly on the children of another; or if by chance such a one were ever found, she would be regarded as a miracle, and be called a white crone.

So begins the Italian tale of “Nennillo and Nennella.”

What mother hasn’t had moments of anger, frustration, exhaustion, and resentment and felt like a monster? What mother hasn’t wanted, against her best judgment, to lash out at a child? How shameful we feel accepting our emotionally-nuanced humanity!

In fairy tales, the dead or missing birth mother is idealized and angelic. In “Cinderella,” the perfect mother is represented by a fairy godmother who appears when Cinderella’s need is urgent. Like all good fairy godmothers, she supplies the necessary goodies for Cinderella’s transformation. In “Vasilisa the Beautiful,” before Vasilisa’s mother dies, she gives her daughter a wooden doll, a stand-in for a fairy godmother, and a perfectly attuned maternal presence.

Both fairy godmother and magical doll represent the capacity of an abandoned child to internalize and elicit “the good mother” within. Despite early life disturbances, through facing adversity, the child develops the ability to trust her inner resources and intuition. Stories like “The Handless Maiden,” “Vasilisa The Beautiful,” and “The Miller’s Daughter” in which the heroine must perform a series of impossible tasks show the development of self to a greater degree. Help also comes from the natural world, from a frog that appears on the path, a wise bird, a friendly wind, and here, too, the heroine must consult her inner wisdom in deciding where to put her trust.

Human wholeness admits we are complex creatures: generous AND selfish, caring AND disengaged. In fairy tales, as in dream work, we can interpret all the characters, including the non-human ones, as “parts” of our psyches. We are the needy helpless children, AND we are brave heroines/heroes. We are Beauty AND we are the beast. We can be sturdy as a tree, blown about like a feather. We burrow in the mud of not-knowing, like frogs. We open our petals in the sunshine, like fragrant roses. Every aspect of a tale can be interpreted and considered symbolically for a more expansive and revelatory understanding of our nature.

The fantasy ending “of happily ever after” can be re-visioned with the knowledge that our suffering does not preclude joy and transformation, possibility and fulfillment. What the tales tell us is that we may be alone, but we are not forsaken; we are part of a vast universe in which helpful forces abound.

[1] Wong, Kate, “Why Humans Give Birth to Helpless Babies,” Scientific American, August 28, 2012

[2] Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, “The act of birth is the first experience attended by anxiety, and is, thus, the source and model of the affect of anxiety.”

[3] Travers, P. L., About Sleeping Beauty (1975), p. 59

[4] Van lerberghe, Wim and Vincent Debrouwere, “Of Blind Alleys and Things That Have Worked: History’s Lessons on Reducing Maternal Mortality,” Research Gate, November 2000

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

If you found this blog interesting, you may also enjoy “How Snow White and Her Cruel Stepmother Help Us Cope with Evil,” “Mothers, Witches, and the Power of Archetypes,” and “Write Your Own Fairy Tale.”

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Archetypes abound in fairy tales, dreams, and nightmares. What do they mean for you?

“Granny is ill,” says the mother in the fairytale “Little Red Riding Hood,” handing her daughter a basket of food for the ailing old woman. Wearing her red cloak, the little girl skips off on the path through the woods to granny’s house.

Along the way, Red Riding Hood meets a wolf. He tricks her into telling him her destination, then races off to grandmother’s and gobbles up the old woman. When Red Riding Hood arrives, the wolf is in granny’s bed wearing her nightclothes. Peeking out from beneath the covers, granny looks odd! We know the fearsome litany. What big arms you have, Grandmother! What big teeth you have! Even young listeners at this point get prickles up their spine and understand that Little Red Riding Hood must flee. But Red Riding Hood disregards the signs of danger and is soon devoured by the wolf.

In her ground-breaking book, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Women Archetype, Clarissa Pinkola Estés discusses naïve women as prey and the common fairy tale motif of the animal groom. According to Pinkola Estés, the animal groom in a tale is “a malevolent thing disguised as a benevolent thing,”¹ a shadow aspect of our psyche. This type of character, wolf or human, represents an inner predator. Unrecognized, this predator can destroy us, but recognized and confronted, it can lead to an awakening of the strong Self that faces down self-destructive tendencies.

Do not talk to strangers. Do not stray from the path. Do not open the door to strangers while we are gone. (The seven dwarves to Snow White.) Here are my keys, but never unlock that closet door. (Bluebeard’s Castle.) Fairytales pulsate with warnings. Trickster spirits—embodied by greedy witches, calculating wizards, and charming wolves—appear without fail. Trickster spirits pop into our lives as well, mercurial figures that enchant, bewitch, attract. The role of the animal groom or other destructive figures in fairy tales is to wake us up to our need to not be easily deceived or to fall into a clever trap, and to our sense of agency.

Fairy tales transport us to a timeless space in which we inhabit the domain of eternal situations—abandonment, displacement, poverty, orphanhood, war, childbirth—and meet archetypal figures, basic human types like the good daughter, the jealous sibling, the feckless father, or wise old woman that have existed across time and cultures. In dreams we may also meet archetypal figures in the shape of robbers, wicked queens, authoritative kings, kindly animals or trees, and dream figures also serve an alerting function: to awaken us to our personal unconscious, to very real situations mirrored in our psychic lives. The dream clown (archetypal figure) has the face of our first boyfriend (from personal memory) who reminds us of our current boyfriend and the uneasiness he inspires (a present situation that needs attending to). The great dream theorist and depth psychologist, Carl Jung, wrote: “The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is. “²

In dreams as in fairy tales, disturbing or brutal images capture our attention. That is their purpose, to rouse us from our habitual ways of seeing and knowing, to alarm us enough so that we sit bolt upright in bed and ask: What is going on in my life?

Jung believed that healing images lie within. Dreams, he assessed, are “small hidden doors in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul.”³ When we study our dreams, we discover the personal motifs, patterns, and themes that actively, though unconsciously, govern our lives. They are our own private fairy tales in vivid color calling to us from within. Revisiting fairy tales, especially ones we are drawn to, can shed light on our own complexes, and provide insight into the images that appear in our dreams. Do we identify with the abused Cinderella taunted by her female kin and find ourselves dreaming of a waif in rags? Are we self-sacrificing? Waiting to be transformed by a godmother? Are we the youngest son competing for our father’s attention? The tales that attract us may give us a whiff of our psyches and appear in some variation in our dreams.

If the haunting images in fairy tales stalk our sleep, and nightmares awaken us, heart thumping, the mood can sometimes carry over into the next day. Neuroscience research on nightmares and other night terrors has enlarged our understanding of what is going on in the brain. For example, researchers have found that in post-traumatic nightmares, a type of nightmare in which a real traumatic event is relived, the amygdala, the structure deep within the brain associated with fear, is overly sensitive. In other types of nightmares, researchers speculate on a neurological fear circuit involving the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex.⁴ Knowing the anatomical mechanism of nightmares aids clinicians in creating specific therapies to help clients work with disturbing dreams, such as rewriting or reframing a frightening dream and meditating on a positive ending.⁵

Let me invite you back into your dreams. If you have tried keeping a journal of dreams and stopped, begin again. If you are exploring dreamwork for the first time, consider this moment a pivotal time to turn within. Whatever you record in your dream journal has value—entire dreams in all their specificity, snippets of dreams, single images or words, associations, doodles, drawing, graphic comics—whatever comes, welcome it.

Record the feeling associated with the dream, both in the dream and upon awakening. If certain feelings and moods continue throughout the day, note them too.

Another way to work with dreams is to make a list of the characters in the dream including non-animate objects like a train, a suitcase, the landscape, rainclouds. Notice where there are conflicting needs and desires between the characters. The train may tell you it’s on a strict timetable. You can ask yourself: Where in my life am I on a strict timetable? How do I feel about this? Notice which characters answer readily and which are hesitant to speak or remain silent. Do these exercises several times over a week and notice what changes in the responses.

Regard whatever comes to you as the vastness of your innate wisdom asking to be heard.

 

Notes

¹  Pinkola Estés, Clarissa, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Women Archetype

² Jung, C. G., “The Practical Use of Dream Analysis”, Collected Works, 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy.

³ Jung, C. G., The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man,” Collected Works,10: Civilization in Transition

⁴ Nielsen, Tore, “The Stress Acceleration Hypothesis of Nightmares,” Frontiers of Neurology, June 1, 2017.

⁵ Tousignant, O. H., Glass, D. J., Suvak, M. K., & Fireman, G. D, “Nightmares and nondisturbed dreams impact daily change in negative emotion,” APA PsycNet 2022

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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Like many writers, I let my curiosity lead me to my next subject of exploration, and lately, I’ve been mighty curious about what’s commonly called the Impostor Syndrome. Leaving aside those afflicted with malignant narcissism, who doesn’t have moments when they feel like a fake?

First described by psychologists Suzanne Imes and Pauline Rose Clance in the 1970s, Impostor Syndrome refers to those who are unable to internalize and accept their success. Rather than owning their ability to achieve, they believe their success is due to luck or some other external factor, and fear they will be unmasked as a fraud. Men and women suffer equally from this debilitating condition. Minority groups, those raised in families that expect high achievement, and perfectionists are more at risk.

But let’s look beyond psychological origins and feel inside the experience itself.

1. Secrets: “The secrets we choose to betray lose power over us.” —Louise Glück

To be caught up in the Impostor Syndrome is to house a secret self we fear is inadequate. We are terrified we are phonies. We are terrified this fraudulent part, concealed beneath a competent exterior, will be revealed. Our inner dialogue proceeds like this:

“Only I know that within the shell of the person called X, whom everyone thinks is reliably bright and capable, is the woeful, cringing real “me.” Others may call me smart, intelligent, even a genius, but I know the truth; I know what they see is an invention, a made-up self.”

The burden of living with a split sense of self and the fear of being discovered requires constant vigilance and takes an emotional toll. Anyone who has kept a toxic secret knows the high cost it exacts. Hiding what shames us consumes energy and requires continual fueling to succeed. Fed by an internal pressure to prove our worthiness, by anxiety and anticipatory dread, we get caught in a frenzied loop that requires we succeed at ever-higher standards of excellence.

2. Culture

This effort to contain and disguise the hidden self corrodes from within; it’s like living with a criminal hiding inside our skin. We inevitably fail to meet our own perfectionist standards; we suffer depression, anxiety, and other common maladies of our time.

And surely it is the times, our contemporary culture, which has given birth to the Imposter Syndrome. A culture that places a higher value on power, authority, and financial accumulation than on enlightenment, kindness, or civic duty. After all, our psychological afflictions are only in small part due to physiological or inherited conditions, and are in large part culturally-conditioned. As in all things paradoxical, individuals create culture even as they are shaped by the culture they create.

One interesting way to consider what a culture values is to examine what it worships, and then compare that with our own set of values.

3. Gods and Goddesses

In the classical Greek world, a pantheon of gods and goddesses, each with his or her set of attributes, dominated psychological, spiritual, and civic life. In contrast to monotheism with its allegiance to a single Father God that created and contains the All, the Greeks, Romans, and Hindus worshipped multiple deities. Athena, for example, born from her father Zeus’s head, was thought to be the Olympian goddess of wisdom, good counsel, and war. A Greek warrior going into battle might visit the Temple of Athena to ask for her assistance; if on a sea voyage, he might pray to Poseidon, the Olympian god of seas, earthquakes and drought. To ensure an abundant crop of corn, the petitioner would sing praises to Demeter. Love troubles? Appeal for Aphrodite’s help. Each god and goddess was valued for his or her specific talents. Together they represent archetypes, the deep structures in our psyches that are inherent potentialities in all of us. (See Goddesses in Everywoman: Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives and other work by Jean Shinoda Bolen.)

As we reflect on the variety of attributes and skills exhibited by the Greek gods, let’s take a moment to appreciate who else is inside us besides the God of Accomplishment. For if we pray to only one god and value only the driven part that accomplishes, we ignore and dishonor all the other deities that inhabit our being. We suppress their latent talents, vitality, and wisdom, which contribute to our wholeness and well-being. (For more on this, please see my recent PT blog post “Trauma: Who is Telling Your Story?”)

In our deepest selves, we know we are more than our successes or our failures, and yet because we live in a society that supports and encourages competition, striving, and power through wealth, the Impostor Syndrome can easily take root. But we must understand and trust that we have other inner figures, archetypes—the ones that come to us in dreams and imaginings—who balance out the figure of the high achiever and who are not at her mercy. Exploring this not only expands our vision of who we are, it begins a marvelous adventure of befriending our unknown or lost parts.

4. Fairy Tale Wisdom

In fairy tales, the story often begins when the hero or heroine’s true self is ignored, mistreated, or unseen. As the story unfolds, a conflict is presented, and a rite of passage ensues. The journey undertaken by the hero/heroine is a soul journey of psychic development. In the familiar tale of Cinderella, an orphaned girl is taunted and shunned by the evil trio of jealous step-mother and step-sisters; if she is to develop and enter into life, she must venture out into the dangerous world and prove herself. In this tale, and in other stories like “The Goose Girl” or “The Armless Maiden,” one’s “outside” identity—that is, the raggedy ash girl or disabled amputee maiden—do not match the hidden radiance and goodness of the inner self. Here, the opposite paradigm to the Imposter Syndrome prevails.

A person possessed by the Impostor Syndrome assesses her worth through external validation, which never seems to satisfy the inner core of uncertainty. The wisdom of fairy tales, however, proposes that recognition and validation of the authentic and worthy self can never come from the “outside.” The tales suggest that we must undertake trials and challenges that affirm and confirm our creative power, must make friends with unknown parts of ourselves (these unknown parts often appear in these tales as helper animals or spirits), and reject the mistaken evaluation of others. Only then, when the Self recognizes its worth and does not demand acceptance and acclamation from others, can we truly embrace our integrity and accept our wholeness, shadow parts and all.

5. Helpful Exercises

a. If what you’ve read gives you the courage to explore, you might sit down right now and make a list of the qualities you value in people. What qualities would you want others to list if they were asked to describe you? How do the lists compare? What qualities are easy for you to own? Which feel out of reach? Insight? Clarity? Playfulness? Authenticity? Imagine you just finished a daunting project and instead of telling yourself, This was a success, you instead say, I did this with integrity. How would you feel?

b. Imagine yourself the hero or heroine of your own fairy tale. What challenges are you facing? List them. What are the obstacles to fulfilling your goals? Include psychological obstacles. What creatures, spirits, ancestors might appear to help you? What is the image you have of yourself once you are transformed? (Think of Cinderella—from ash girl to princess.) What would you like to become?

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

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In a recent New Yorker article about White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, I came across the following description of a meeting she had that included her father, Mike Huckabee, and then-candidate Donald Trump.

“There (at the Atlanta airport) they boarded Trump’s private jet. . . .When Trump asked Huckabee for an endorsement, Huckabee instead suggested that he (Trump) enlist his daughter. Trump needed a stronger link to evangelicals and women, and Sanders was happy to provide one.”

The operative word in the above quote is “happy.” Ms. Sanders was consensual, if not enthusiastic, about working for Mr. Trump. A darker, more sinister version of this enactment, a daughter offered up by a father for personal gain, appeasement, or out of ignorance is a recurrent narrative thread in myths and fairy tales and underlines the role of the sacrificial daughter.

In the Brothers Grimm’s version of “The Girl without Hands,” a poor miller in need of money inadvertently makes a pact with the devil who “will come in three years to claim that which stands behind the mill.” That turns out to be, not the apple tree the miller thought, but his daughter who was sweeping the yard at the time.

The miller’s daughter was a beautiful and pious girl, and she lived the three years worshipping God and without sin. When the time was up and the day came when the evil one was to get her, she washed herself clean and drew a circle around herself with chalk. The devil appeared very early in the morning, but he could not approach her.

He spoke angrily to the miller, “Keep water away from her, so she cannot wash herself any more. Otherwise I have no power over her.”

The miller was frightened and did what he was told. The next morning the devil returned, but she had wept into her hands, and they were entirely clean. Thus he still could not approach her, and he spoke angrily to the miller, “Chop off her hands. Otherwise I cannot get to her.”

The miller was horrified and answered, “How could I chop off my own child’s hands!”

Then the evil one threatened him, saying, “If you do not do it, then you will be mine, and I will take you yourself.” This frightened the father, and he promised to obey him. Then he went to the girl and said, “My child, if I do not chop off both of your hands, then the devil will take me away, and in my fear I have promised him to do this. Help me in my need, and forgive me of the evil that I am going to do to you.” She answered, “Dear father, do with me what you will. I am your child,” and with that she stretched forth both hands and let her father chop them off.

Eventually, after a journey and travails, and because she is pious and good, the miller’s daughter marries a king and her hands are restored.

Another tale in which a poor miller father sells his daughter to gain stature and wealth is the story of “Rumpelstiltskin.” Here the father brags to the king that his daughter can spin straw into gold. She is brought to the king, locked into a room and given the command, her life in jeopardy if she fails to succeed at this impossible task. Narcissism, greed, and domination in the figures of father and king are allied against her. With the help of the magical imp Rumpelstiltskin, the daughter succeeds in her task, but in exchange must give him her firstborn child. She is finally able to claim her child and her independence only after she guesses the name of her tormentor, “Rumpelstiltskin.” Psychologically, this rings true: until we name the negative force that has hold of us, we remain within its power.

The unnamed daughter of Jephthah in the Bible is not so lucky to be saved (Judges 11:30-40). Her father makes a vow with God:

^11:30 And Jephthah made the following vow to Yhwh: “If You deliver the Ammonites into my hands, ^11:31 then whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me on my safe return from the Ammonites shall be Yhwh’s and shall be offered by me as a burnt offering.

Unfortunately, it is Jephthah’s daughter who dances out of his house to greet him. She accepts her sacrificial fate, but asks her father for two months in the mountains with her women to celebrate her virginity. This is granted.  Nonetheless, she is consecrated as an offering to the Lord. She is able to tell herself she is not a victim without choice. Unlike the miller in “The Girl without Hands,” Jephthah is motivated by ambition, not necessity. He is a warrior and a leader, and his success against the Ammonites will make him the rosh or head of Gilead.

Yet another story concerning the sacrifice of a daughter for the ambitions of a warrior-hero-father is the Greek myth of Iphigenia. King Agamemnon, Iphigenia’s father, is about to wage war on Troy. However, Agamemnon has insulted the goddess Artemis, who in retaliation has becalmed the seas so that his fleet cannot set sail. To appease Artemis, Agamemnon must sacrifice his eldest daughter, Iphigenia. For the glory of Greece, Iphigenia goes willingly to her death.

Fairy tales and myths, as Carl Jung suggested, reveal archetypal motifs that offer insight into our human wishes, fantasies, fears and desires. Whether we identify with Cinderella’s lonely plight, or the frog prince’s yearning to be his fully human self, at the deepest level of fairy tale content, we experience an “Aha!” phenomena. Jack Zipes, in the preface to the 1979 edition of Breaking the Magic Spell, Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales, writes:

“From birth to death we hear and imbibe the lore of folk and fairy tales and sense that they can help us reach our destiny. They know and tell us that we want to become kings and queens, ontologically speaking to become masters of our own realms….They ferret out deep-rooted wishes, needs, and wants and demonstrate how they all can be realized.”

Jung saw fairy tales as depicting patterns of development and behavior that reflect the function of the psyche, and even today we can find new wisdom about our human predicaments in the old tales.

With this in mind, how do we think about the tales of sacrificial daughters? What does it mean that in most fairy tales, a jealous or evil king may send his son on a dangerous journey or give him an impossible task to fulfill, but rarely is the son held captive, enslaved, mutilated, or murdered? Might sacrificial daughters represent a collective cultural phenomena of the devalued feminine?

One pattern that emerges in several of these stories is that of the absent, passive, or duped mother. This is the mother who won’t or can’t protect her victimized daughter. Her loyalty often remains with the father, and she will not disobey the ruling masculine hierarchy. (In keeping with Greek themes of inherited or familial revenge, Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, does in some version of the story kill her husband for his murder of their daughter.)

The absent, compliant, or complicit mother unwillingly abets the father in treating females as objects by colluding with and succumbing to the spell of his power. Without a positive mother figure in her life, the daughter has nothing of substance from the personal mother or from the world of the feminine. For this daughter, the adored or charismatic father can take on the qualities of a god. Both Jephthah’s daughter and Iphigenia do not resist their fate, but in some sense become martyrs to their father’s cause as in the gruesome example of the miller’s daughter who deferentially accepts the dismemberment of her hands. To be without hands means to be helpless in the world, to be unable to perform ordinary human tasks. Here, the daughter forgoes a part of her humanness to accommodate the father. “Do with me what you will, father,” she says. “For I am your child.”

To identify with the dominant ruling culture is often a way women cope with subjugation and abuse. In her ground-breaking book Toward a New Psychology of Women (1976), decades old but ever more relevant in today’s #MeToo world, Dr. Jean Baker Miller examines women’s difficulties in claiming their “full personhood” and in valuing themselves and their strengths, which are viewed as inferior by the dominant culture.

“A dominant group,” Miller writes, “inevitably, has the greatest influence in determining a culture’s overall outlook—its philosophy, morality, social theory, and even its science. The dominant group, thus, legitimizes the unequal relationship and incorporates it into society’s guiding concepts.” Not just women, but all marginalized groups share this experience since the dominant group is the model for what is considered normal.

Conversely, writes Miller, “a subordinate group has to concentrate on basic survival. Accordingly, direct, honest reaction to destructive treatment is avoided. Open, self-initiated action in its own self-interest must also be avoided…. In our own society, a woman’s direct action can result in a combination of economic hardship, social ostracism, and psychological isolation.”

If we take a quick glance around the globe, we can see that subordinate populations on every continent, and women in general, are subjected to less than equal treatment.

In the stories mentioned above, each daughter acquiesces to the demands of the father, the dominant power figure, and by identifying with him and his goals, deludes herself into believing that his perpetration is a noble act. Her self-worth depends on his status. Historically, women have been “unable to see much value or importance in themselves or each other, when women were focused on men as the important people.”

Miller goes on to say, “There are still few women who can believe deeply that they are truly worthy.” What has been continues to be: women struggle against being cast in the inferior role in society. In reexamining fairy tales we consider how they continue to reflect conscious and unconscious attitudes in a culture. If popular culture, particularly children’s movies and books, has shifted its focus from the sacrificial daughter, what images have replaced it? While vibrant images of sharp-shooting, dragon-slaying heroines occasionally fill our screens, the emergence of the #MeToo and other movements for equal rights and justice suggest post-modern Disney heroines are not enough; unconscious prejudices require our personal and deepest attention and consideration to be confronted, made visible and redeemed. Unfortunately, for now, the prejudices, injustices, and issues of worth that revolve around power, domination, and subordination persist.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 

 

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