Youth, as a stage of life, has been put front and center in literary fairy tales, often more so than the stages of midlife and older age. This course explores stories that give us glimpses into the lessons Elders are uniquely tasked to recognize and learn in their journey toward individuation. We will find motifs such as gender role reversal, inversion of fortune, memory, time travel, and the effectiveness of collective action in the stories, images, and music that are the foundation for each session. We will review Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development and Jung’s work on ageing. We will discuss selections from Lithuanian stories of “Laumas” (elderly female giants who rescue children) and the book Handsome Heroines: Women as Men in Folklore by Shahrukh Husain, as well as the “Graeae” of Greek mythology, among others.

The class also serves as an introduction to Jungian Arts-Based Research (JABR) methodology and students are encouraged to incorporate this approach into their own creative practices. Building upon the concept of trans-disciplinarity in physics, it applies Jung’s work on the transcendent function to offer creatives a way to examine subjectivity and multiple meaning making without hierarchies. It is not a form of art therapy but can be therapeutic in the creative process.