What do fairytales have to do with the current cultural and personal condition of modern life? One wonders how tales of princes and talking toads can possibly inform our fears and terror threatening our everyday lives post 9/11. The post cold war world we live in has created a vacuum where our most primitive anxieties are projected randomly at targets as pop-ups do on our computer.

We are finding ourselves responding more impulsively to arising situations. We are no longer able to hold still and reflect on our own plights in order to find ways of dealing with them. The way through dilemmas, both personal and cultural, involves learning to tap again the evocative, oracular, compelling voice of myth and imagination, which echoes in the psychic depths, ever capable of revival, and potent with hidden resources.

Fairytales may offer us a key to resolve our life riddles.

Of the various types of mythological literature, fairytales are the simplest and purest expressions of the

collective unconscious and

thus offer the clearest

understanding of the basic patterns of the human psyche. Every people or nation has its own way of experiencing this psychic reality. A study of the world’s fairytales yields a wealth of insights into the deep experiences of humankind.

In a true fairytale, such as those collected by the Brothers Grimm, human beings undergo trials and suffering and accept that deeds are a part of proving oneself worthy of the reward at the end of the path, whether the reward is the hand of the princess or a kingdom. They confront evil and overcome it.

Linda Freeman, Jungian analyst, and expert in the study of fairytales says: “The animals that talk, the heroes who win the princess, the witches who work for both good and evil, the worn-out kings, the missing queens, the ego driven sons who die in their attempts to get the prize of ruler, are all archetypes, that is, the skeleton bones of the nature of the psyche that defines us as humans.”

Who does not remember the experience of listening to a fairytale as a child? Why were we so enthralled by these tales? Are these stories for adults or children?

Each person needs a field of activity for his inner life, for his willing, feeling, and finally for his thinking soul. The child needs this field of activity for the strength of his soul, as does each adult. Such stories strengthen the moral lives of children, so that later, after these pictures have lived in them for many years as seeds, this strength and guidance will help them to deal with the challenges life brings to them even as they grow up.

Fairytales have an enormous and irreplaceable value in the life of mankind. They educate, support and liberate our emotions. Fairytales provide a unique way for children and adults to come to terms with the dilemmas of their inner lives.

In order to benefit from the wisdom of fairytales one has to avoid both the demythologising tendency of secularism; scientific reductionism and the equally damaging tendency of fundamentalism to literalise archetypal and mythic

material.

Therefore it is important not to jump quickly into making an interpretation of the symbolism in a fairy-tale. Fairytales take us into another world, in the world of abstraction, and into the unconscious realm. So it is very limiting and presumptuous both as a listener, reader, client and as a healer, to put a subjective lens over the interpretation of fairytales.

A sound knowledge of fairytales helps us to befriend archetypal material, to be able to recognise it, to know its depth, and hopefully to help us in our personal transformation. It is for this reason

that we practise fairytale

interpretation.

The rich images of the language of the fairytales act as an antidote to the empty and unimaginative world we live in. As we listen to the news, as we watch endless images of senseless violence and desperate human condition, we are suffering insignificance as we have never done before. Society, by telling its old stories and narratives, by listening to them afresh, has a model for remembering and redeeming lost contents and a methodo-

logy for transforming itself.

Ms Freeman emphasises that, “what appears insignificant in fairytales is often the very key to change. The least rational option is the only way forward to discovering what inertia in the unconscious is preventing us from feeling alive enough to create change and thereby create renewed meaning and purpose through our actions”.

Ms Freeman, who is a senior training analyst with the Independent Group of Analytical Psychologists in the UK, is being invited to Malta by CPDM to give a weekend workshop on the “Interpretation of Fairytales”, on 1 and 2 April. This seminar is open to all those professionals working in the fields of education, drama, arts, literature, anthropology, sociology and psychology and who share an interest in the subject of fairy tales.

For more information kindly contact Laner Cassar on 9945 2698, Christiane Sullivan on 9947 3456 or visit their website at www.cpdmalta.org

Laner Cassar and Christiane Sullivan are EAP registered psychotherapists