The latest issue of the Jung Journal arrives with a richly themed collection gathered under the banner of Fairy Tales and Myths. Spanning Snow Queens and mermaids, Medusa and Perseus, Odin and Superman, the issue ranges across cultures, centuries, and registers to ask what the stories we tell and retell, reveal about the deeper structures of the psyche. Audrey Punnett’s editorial introduction to the issue is open access and serves as a useful orientation to the themes and intentions behind this fairy tales and myths issue, and a good place to start if you’re new to the Jung Journal.
Fairy Tales and the Feminine
Several of the issue’s strongest pieces cluster around feminine individuation and transformation. Dariane Pictet opens with a reading of Andersen’s Snow Queen as a story of heart-healing, while Tina Stromsted revisits the Handless Maiden as a tale of healing and wholeness. Kristine Gazel takes a darker path into “Fitcher’s Bird”, a lesser-known Grimm tale, offering an alchemical analysis of the feminine attitude toward evil. Nitika Kumar extends this territory into the Indian psyche, exploring a daughter’s journey beyond the father as a model of feminine individuation. Audrey Punnett, the issue’s editor, contributes her own piece on a Norwegian folktale exploring the tension between darkness and light. Josephine Evetts-Secker rounds out this section by examining what gets left unresolved in two tales; the loose ends and unfinished business that fairy stories sometimes leave behind.
Myth, Archetype, and the Deeper Patterns
The issue moves fluidly between fairy tale and myth. Isabelle Meier brings a neuroscientific lens to the story of Medusa and Perseus, reading freeze and fight responses as archetypal patterns. Guy Perel explores hope, Hades, and the Self in what promises to be a rich piece on depth and resurrection. Diana Malek takes a more playful angle, reimagining Narcissus in a contemporary key. Malene Thastum rounds things out with a Faroese fairy tale read through the four elements.
The most-read piece in the issue so far is also one of its most timely and it’s open access. Paul Wassmann’s Odin, a God for Our Times offers a substantial appraisal of the Poetic Edda poem “Odin’s Quest after the Runes” as a fundamental myth of individuation. At a moment when Norse mythology is being claimed by some very unhelpful quarters of contemporary culture, a careful and serious Jungian reading of Odin feels particularly valuable.
Culture, Art, and Contemporary Life
The issue also reaches beyond the clinical and theoretical. Graça Almeida Rodrigues offers a Jungian reading of the Portuguese painter Paula Rego’s inner world. Jerry Deckelbaum reflects on the Dummling — the fairy tale fool — while Josephine Evetts-Secker examines what gets left unresolved in two tales. In a more contemporary vein, a trio of authors offer a Jungian review of James Gunn’s 2025 Superman film, reading it as a symbolic mirror of the hero archetype. John Beebe contributes a film and video review, Sentimental Value.
Free to Read: Poetry
The issue’s poetry section is introduced by poetry editor Paul Watsky in a preface that is open access to all readers. The section itself features a translated selection of Natsume Sōseki’s Ten Nights of Dreams from 1908, one of Japanese literature’s most dreamlike and psychologically resonant works, here translated into English.
Personal Essays and More
The issue’s Blocks and Mortar section gathers personal essays from contributors including Karen Naifeh on the myth of Iphigenia in her own individuation process. Jiangxue Li offers a piece on the River Snail Girl, a figure from Chinese folklore. Chaitanya Sridhar explores the emergence of Gajalakshmi, the Hindu goddess of elephants. Xiaoting Joyce contributes an essay titled Like an Anonymous Fetish, and Stacy Hassen closes the ARAS section with She Seeds a Generative Earth. Together they paint a vivid picture of myth and archetype as living, personal forces.
Book Reviews
The issue closes with two book reviews. Brian Nuckols reconsiders the puer archetype through the unlikely but intriguing lens of Tori Amos’s Tori and the Muses, tracing a journey from persecution to partnership. Dennis Patrick Slattery reviews Aryeh Maidenbaum’s Jung and the Jewish Experience: Reflections by a Jungian Analyst, seeking meaning in the spaces between Jewish history and Jungian thought.