There was once a Princess who became betrothed to a King who lived far away. Her mother, the Queen, packed up her dowry of silver and gold for the journey. Then she took out a small knife and cut one of her fingers, letting three drops of blood fall onto her handkerchief. This she gave to her daughter personally saying, ‘dear child, look after this carefully. It will be of great service to you along the way.’
The royal procession set off on its way, the Princess astride her talking horse, Falada. After some time the Princess became thirsty and asked her lady-in-waiting, who had a mean look to her, to fetch her some water. ‘Get it yourself’, came the retort; so the Princess got down from Falada and bent down low over a stream to drink. In that moment her mother’s handkerchief fell from her tunic and was carried away on the swiftly flowing waters. The lady-in-waiting noticed this and silently rejoiced because she knew that with this loss she now had power over the young bride. When the Princess returned to the bridal party she found the lady in waiting astride Falada. ‘My nag will do for you.’
At every step of the journey the Princess had to make one concession after another, loosing first her royal clothes, then her jewels and finally her crown to the wicked maid who, as they arrived at the bridegroom’s castle, made her her swear a blood oath never to tell anyone what had happened.
The young King welcomed the wicked maid as his bride. His father, the old King, noticed the Princess standing forlorn in the courtyard and later asked the false bride about her. ‘ Oh, she is just someone I picked up along the way, give her some work to do.’ So the old King gave her to the goose herd, Conrad, and bad her tend the flock out in the meadow all day long. Meantime the false bride had become anxious that Falada might tell the story of what happened to someone so she begged her new husband to sell the horse to the knacker and have him kill the animal for meat and hide. The Princess came to hear of what was to pass and paid the knacker to hang up Falada’s head in an archway on her route to the meadow so she could exchange a few loving words with him.
‘Alas Falada, hanging there!’ she grieved.
‘Alas, young Queen, how ill you fare. If this your Mother knew, her heart would break in two.’
Once out in the pasture Conrad tried to take advantage of the Princess. He notices her unbraiding her plaits and is spellbound by the golden locks, wanting some of her hair for himself. She summoned the wind to blow off his hat such that he had to chase it about here and there, leaving her in peace to comb and braid her hair once more.
“Blow, blow, thou gentle wind, I say,
Blow Conrad’s little hat away,
And make him chase it here and there,
Until I have braided all my hair
And bound it up again.”
Conrad later complained to the old King that the Princess were some kind of witch who spoke to dead horses and summoned the wind. The old King hid himself next morning and watched her as she exchanged loving words with Faluda’s head and distracted Conrad with the wind once out in the meadow so that he would leave her alone.
That evening the old King took her aside and asked why she did these things but the Princess was mindful of her blood oath and said nothing. The old King, being wise, said, ‘well if you will not tell me perhaps you can tell it to the hearth,’ and he went away. The girl crept towards the hearth and cried pitifully, emptying her heart into the darkness. Meantime the old King had been standing close by and heard everything. He went to his son and told him he had been duped by the wicked maid and that the goose girl was in fact his true bride. A feast was laid on and when the false bride arrived the old King asked her a riddle, ‘what punishment should be served on an usurper who betrays her mistress?’ The maid replied she should be put naked into a barrel spiked with nails and dragged about the streets… and so it came to pass. The maid dies a hideous death and the Princess is reinstated to her former station. She marries the young King and they live happily ever after.
We are used to the idea that fairy tales are symbolic. But what do we mean by that exactly? Moreover, how are we to understand a symbolic story which has, as its central theme, the consequences which unfold as a result of the loss of the symbol, the handkerchief with its three spots of blood? Let’s begin by seeing if we can arrive at a definition of what is meant by ‘symbol’ and then see what we can understand from the story about what happens when the symbol is lost.
For Freud symbols are effectively allegories, X means Y. The camouflage of cultural prudery simply has to be stripped away to reveal what the symbol ‘really’ means. His approach is reductive and runs the risk of the symbol being diminished to ‘nothing but’ repressed sexuality, a death wish, or something equally distasteful to Victorian sensibilities, a stand-in for a repressed idea, wish, or traumatic memory. Thus the blood spotted handkerchief would likely be treated in a way which limited its significance to a transitional or, in fact, displaced maternal object.
From a Freudian perspective the loss would therefore represent the painful separation from the mother and the consequent instability of the daughter’s identity. At the same time, because blood is associated with menstruation, virginity and sexual maturation, the talisman and its loss would seem to condense meaning into the daughter’s ambivalence to impending adult sexuality.
Bettleheim, following in Freud’s footsteps, treates the story in his ,’Uses of Enchantment’ as a cautionary Oedipal tale warning children to give up the idea of usurping the same sex parent, ‘because of the terrible retribution which is meted out to [those who seek] to replace the rightful marital partner.’
Whilst such a rendering of the symbol is interesting it doesn’t seem to do the fullest scope of meaning justice, not to mention the sense that the symbol and therefore the whole story is given no more significance than that of an educational artefact interpreted along the lines of paradigm a priori accepted as gospel. You cannot help but feel that classical psychoanalysis approaches such gems rubbing its hands together with a preordained sense of, ‘well, we already know what this means.’
Jung’s approach is really quite different, a symbol for him is ‘the best possible expression for something unknown.’ He goes further, anything can be considered symbolic, ‘if we assume that it states or signifies something more and other than itself which eludes our present knowledge, [but] is nonetheless known to exist.’CW 6 §814 And then a step further; ‘The symbol is alive only so long as it is pregnant with meaning.’ (§816)
In other words, whilst we understandably want to know what the symbol means we mustn’t jump to conclusions. The symbol is not only essentially unknowable but derives its very significance by refusing to be an object of knowledge. As soon as we say, ‘it means X’, it becomes a lifeless remnant and loses its transformative potential. Hence Jung’s insistence on developing the ‘symbolic attitude’, which is essentially one of epistemological humility in which we have to admit we are eternally out of our depth. Having said that we may still make some valuable observations/approximations provided we refrain from trying to draw any definite set of conclusions.
It could be said that Jung does not, in fact, go far enough in his collected works. In his rebuttal of Freud he seems to be somewhat on the back foot and leaves others to develop the idea that the symbol is not only unknowable but alive. His insistence that we consider our attitude towards the symbol is not quite the nuanced approach of Gerhard Adler’s conviction that the symbol is alive. Adler takes this to its logical conclusion and insists on ‘relationship with’ as well as ‘attitude towards’.
The difference between Jung and Adler’s formulation of what constitutes a symbol is considerable. By way of example, I recall being invited to lunch by a girlfriend’s mother for the first time. Her ‘attitude towards’ me was polite enough, though her failure to ‘relate with’ was made embarrassingly evident when she leaned past me to address her daughter at the end of the meal, asking in a hoarse whisper, ‘does he want any more?’ For god’s sake, I was sat right there. The guest, the symbol, deserves to be addressed directly.
Having said that, Jung’s approach to the symbol in the Red Book is very different from his formulations in the shop front of the collected works. There he affords the symbol with a visceral autonomy and intimacy of feeling absent in the academic exposition of his more scholarly publications. Jung writes, ‘I did not consider that my soul cannot be the object of my judgment and knowledge; much more are my judgment and knowledge the objects of my Soul.’ His insistence that the Red Book only be published 50 years after his death is testimony to the taboo we have against treating the emanations of the unconscious as having their own life. The handkerchief has indeed been lost.
Where Jung and Adler agree is that the loss of the handkerchief, the symbol which connects to one’s origins, is responsible for the collective neurosis of our time. Whilst the handkerchief could well represent a loss of personal connection, fairytales are collective motifs and have a phylogenic significance as well as an ontological one. From a cultural point of view the story describes the hidden cost of the Age of Enlightenment with its emergence of independent ego consciousness. The Princess as spirit-of-the-times loses her bond to the (ma)trix of her belonging, her rootedness in the psyche, the spirit-of-the-depths, and becomes so alienated from herself in the process that the collective shadow/false self comes into ascendency resulting in baleful regression and self estrangement.
In our story this decline is represented by the usurpation of the false bride, and the degradation of the Princess’ status which follows. ‘The unexpected result of this development is that an uglier face is put upon the world.’ (CW10 para 181) The monotheism of consciousness loses its connection to the unconscious such that its later ‘discovery’ by Freud characterises it as no more than the ego’s repository.
Adler explicitly defines neurosis as a loss of the symbolic attitude. Jung describes our collective neurosis as one of excessive civilisation, which amounts to the same thing. Jung’s argument is not that civilisation is bad. It is that civilisation has produced an extreme one-sidedness of consciousness which has become so highly differentiated and rational it has cost us a dissociation from the archaic layers of the psyche and left us marooned in a pre-symbolic concretised world devoid of meaning. Moreover, the ‘chymical wedding’, the internal synthesis of opposites, the fruition of human consciousness, cannot occur. The Princess loses all her power to the false bride, is struck dumb and sent out to mind the geese.
Fortunately there are forces at play other than those of chaos and ill will. The presence in the story of Falada, the speaking horse, suggests the agency of centres of consciousness other than that of the ego, which, try as one might, cannot be silenced or killed off. Falada’s continued support of the Princess, even after death, suggests a locus of unconditional influence in the psyche immune to circumstantial events. It also suggests that meaning is intrinsic to being and not something merely ascribed by consciousness. This is rather different from the ordinary idea that consciousness simply projects meaning onto an inert object and underscores both the agency and the autonomy of the symbol. Analyst Barbra Hannah describes Falada’s head as the autonomous inner intelligence that punctures self-deception.
Falada repeatedly refers to our Princess as ‘young Queen’, reminding her of who the really is and that her current station as goose girl is neither real nor acceptable. He also repeatedly references her mother’s grief which maintains the connection to the archaic psyche despite the loss of the handkerchief.
‘Alas, young Queen, how ill you fare. If this your Mother knew, her heart would break in two.’
For as long as the false bride sits on the throne, the Princess is plagued by the immature iteration of her animus. Conrad is juvenile, harassing, intrusive, demeaning and wants a piece of her. She can only keep him bay by invoking the intervention of the wind to keep him busy. The un-braiding and re-braiding of her hair seems to represent the ‘de-integration’ and ‘re-integration’ of the developing psyche described by analyst Michael Fordham, those natural operations required for individuation to take place whereby the psyche alternatively loosens and then reconfigures itself in the process of establishing increasingly mature and differentiated ego states. In order to do this the Princess needs to get Conrad off her back and summons the wind to do the job. The Princess is having to reach beyond herself, past the instinctive knowing of Falada to something truly elemental. She does not command the wind, she invokes it, speaking to it as a living being.
‘Blow, blow thou gentle wind..’
In myth and legend the wind is often associated with a benevolent and protective natural power which comes to the aid of human distress. In the Odyssey, Athena implores Zeus to send favourable winds to aid Odysseus. In the story of Zephyrus and Psyche, from Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, Zephyrus, the west wind, acts as a helper. Cupid’s servants place Psyche in a beautiful meadow, and Zephyrus carries the vulnerable woman into a protected psychic space.
The Princess’ prayerful invocation not only mobilises the wind, it acts as a reconnection to the living protective symbol originally contained in the handkerchief. By calling on the wind the Princess is remembering her lost connection to the archaic layers of the psyche which then has the magical effect of bringing about transformation. Her reliance on the wind, the embodiment of ego’s dependence on factors other than its own mastery and control, bring about a succession of events, Conrad’s complaint to the old King, which then gets this more mature animus figure involved. His trick with the hearth reconnects the Princess with the divine feminine, since the hearth is the realm of Hestia, sister to Hera, the mother of the Gods. The natural order of things being restored, Nature takes its course and the Princess is returned to her rightful station.
Our story describes the process by which the loss of the symbol, the handkerchief, which connects ego consciousness to the archaic realm of the psychic matrix, plunges the bereft Princess into neurotic disorder. It then shows how the autonomous operation of instinctive forces represented by Falada, maintains her spirits while the even more elemental psychoid forces of the wind protect her during the psychological work of braiding and unbraiding necessary to catch the old King’s attention. The story shows how the ego is not the agent of transformation in the psyche, but that by patiently attending to what’s needed circumstances are influenced such that help might be forthcoming. The reestablishment of the symbolic attitude demonstrated by the value afforded to Falada’s head and the invocation of aid from the wind, set in motion the restitutive events which resolve the neurosis and lead full circle to the recovery of wholeness.
You must be logged in to post a comment.