We are storytelling animals, hard-wired for story. From childhood onwards, we perceive and make sense of the world through the stories we find – or the stories which find us. They are the stars we navigate by. Fairy tales are especially potent in this respect, and they help us to reimagine ourselves, because at the heart of them is transformation. They foster a belief in the possibility of change, so that we come to see that there are other ways of imagining the world and our place in it – and of living more intensely, and more richly, in a world that is often filled with challenge, and sorrow.
This program offers an archetypal approach to understanding and working with fairy tales. In her 1970 book, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Marie-Louise von Franz describes fairy tales as ‘the purest and simplest expression of the collective unconscious psychic process … representing the archetypes in their simplest, barest and most concise form.’ We’ll use the Fairy-tale Heroine’s Journey as a framework for exploring the archetypal feminine in fairy tales and the ways in which these stories can illuminate the process of individuation.
We’ll be guided by ideas and practices from the field of narrative psychology, which holds that the past is not fixed and irreversible but is based on our interpretation of who we are and what has happened to us. In this program we’ll excavate fairy tales to interrogate our self-narratives, identify problem-saturated stories and externalize them, and then learn to rewrite them so that we can more fully participate in the process of our own becoming. There are many therapeutic applications for this kind of narrative work, and so we’ll work with fairy tales which illuminate sexual abuse, domestic violence, addiction, terminal illness and bereavement. We’ll also identify stories which can illuminate specific stages of life, such as menarche, motherhood, midlife, menopause and elderhood.
This program will be suitable both for clinicians and for individuals who are interested in deepening their personal work with fairy tales and the many forms of storytelling.