Quantum Drummer

Introduction

     Carl Jung spent a good amount of time studying fairy tales, he believed that they are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes, and that they represented the archetypes in their simplest, barest, and most concise form (Von Franz, 1970). Since there is no possibility of translating the content of every archetype into intellectual terms, the fairy tales is one of the best explanations available for the study of the unconscious, and they describe the same psychic facts, repeated throughout many different variations of the same tales in different cultures and geographies.

     This paper performs the interpretation of one example fairy tale, “The Spirit in the Bottle” by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, following the method defined by Jung’s heir, Marie-Louise von Franz.

Von Franz’s Method of Psychological Interpretation

     In Von Franz’s method, the archetypal story is divided into the four stages of the classic drama, the exposition, the people involved or dramatis personae, the naming of the problem, the ups and downs of the story or peripeteia. After these stages are determined, a comparison is made to determine if this theme occurs in other tales, including a process of amplification by enlarging through collecting a quantity of parallels, then construct the context of the story and then the last essential step of performing the interpretation, or translating the amplified story into psychological language.

     It is important to note, however, that the interpretations of fairy tales are relative, and the psychological language to be used is about what the story might seem to represent, trying to find agreement with other people’s interpretation and also with our own dreams. In the end, for the interpretation to be satisfactory, it must generate a validating answer from the psyche.

Summary of the Tale

     A poor woodcutter had an only son, and he saved some money to send the son to school, so the son could support him when he got old. The son went off to school and was a good student who received praise from his teachers, but after two classes the money his father gave him ran out, and the boy was required to return home. The father told him that he was not able to earn more money than to pay for their daily bread, but the son told him, “Dear father, don’t trouble yourself about it, if it is God will, it will turn to my advantage.”  The father wanted to go into the woods to chop and stack wood and earn more money, and the son wanted to go with him and help him. The father did not want the son to go, arguing that he was not accustomed to rough work, and besides he did only have one axe, but the son said that he could borrow an ax from the neighbor until he could earn enough money to buy his own.

      During the first day of work the son was quite merry and brisk, and at noon, the father said they should rest and have their meal, and then get back to work. The son said that rather than resting, he wanted to go into the forest and look for bird’s nests, and the father told him that he would be a fool by doing that, since he would be tired and he would not be able to work in the afternoon, and told his son to sit besides him.

     The son went into the forest anyway and after a while he found a very old and dangerous-looking oak tree. When he got closer to the tree he heard a voice saying: “Let me out, let me out!. He followed the voice and found that it came from the ground, amongst the roots of the oak-tree. The boy began to loosen the earth under the tree and after a while he found a glass bottle, and inside the bottle he saw a creature shaped like a frog. The creature continued to yell “Let me out, let me out! And the boy without thinking anymore removed the cork and immediately a spirit ascended from the bottle until it grew as big as half the tree. Once out, the spirit told the boy that he would give him the reward for having letting him out, and this reward was to strangle him. The boy told the spirit that he should have told him that sooner, and he should have let the spirit inside the bottle. The spirit said that he was the mighty Mercurius, and that he was shut up inside the bottle for a long time as a punishment, but regardless he should strangle whoever released him from the bottle. The boy told the spirit that first he wanted to be sure that he was the right spirit, and that he should verify that he could fit inside the bottle, so he asked the spirit to prove it and get back inside the bottle. The boy deceived the spirit and as soon as the spirit got into the bottle he thrust the cork back into the bottle and threw the bottle amongst the roots of the tree. The boy was about to leave but the spirit told him once again to release him, but the boy told the spirit that he would not release him twice since he wanted to take his life. The spirit, however, told him that if he was released, he would give the boy so much that he would have plenty all the days of his life. The boy insisted he would not release the spirit but the spirit said again that he would not do the boy any harm but reward him richly. The boy decided to take the chance, and released the spirit once again. The spirit went out of the bottle and grew again as big as a giant. The spirit gave the boy a little rag, just like sticking-plaster, and told him that if he spread one end of the rag over a wound it would heal, and if he rub steel or iron with the other end it will be changed into silver. The boy tested the rag by tearing off a piece of bark from a tree and then using the rag to heal the wound and it did heal. So they thanked each other and the boy went back to his father. His father gave the boy a hard time because he had been away for so long, and had some hard words for the boy about “he always knowing that the boy would never come to anything”. The boy wanted to get back to work and he swiped his axe with the rag and hit the tree, but since the axe turned into silver  its edge bent, and the father was angry again since he was required to pay the axe back to the neighbor. The boy wanted to leave the forest but he did not know his way out and he asked the father to go with him. Then the father got angry again because the boy did not want to work anymore but finally he agreed and they went back home. When they got back home the father told his son to go and sell the damaged axe, so he would kmnow how much more money would he have to earn to pay back the neighbor, but the boy went and sold the axe to a goldsmith, and since it was made of silver, he got plenty of money to pay back for the axe and to live well. The father was surprised to find out that the boy had so much money and the boy told him his story.  With the money he got left, the boy went back to school and since he could use the rag to heal wounds, he became the most famous doctor in the world.

Interpretation of Grimm’s The Spirit in the Bottle

     The exposition – the definition of time and place, mostly defining a situation of timelessness and spacelessness. In this tale, time is defined by “There was once” at the beginning of the story, and place is somewhat undetermined. After further reading, it can be implied that the people involved lived in a small town that did not have a High School, and that the town is somewhat close to a forest.

     The People Involved (Dramatis Personae) – With the recommendation of counting the number of people at the beginning and at the end of the story. For our tale, there are two persons involved at the beginning, the Woodcutter and his son. Later in the story the spirit appears, in the shape of a frog, trapped inside a bottle. Some secondary characters are mentioned, such as the neighbor who owns the axe borrowed by the father so they can go to the forest to chop and stack wood, and later a goldsmith, who bought the silver axe from the son. The story ends with the same two main characters, the father and the son. In reality, the two main characters of the story are the father and the son, and the way the relationship is among them.

     The naming of the problem – The story describes two different problem conditions, the first problem was that the father and son were very poor, and the father gave the little money he had to send his son to High School. The boy went to school and returned home when the money ran out. The father said that he could not give the son any more money since he could only earn enough for the daily bread. The second problem occurs when the boy releases the spirit and he is threatened by the spirit with stranglement , so the problem is that the boy is in risk of losing his life. However, this represented mostly an opportunity in which the boy’s intelligence made things change in his favor and he ended up finding solution to their economic problems forever.

     The peripetia, or ups and downs of the story –  The story seems to have a few peripeteiai. First in the economic sense, the boy was given money to go to school, then the money ran out and he was required to leave school, next the boy was required to help his father and by doing this he was able to find the spirit. The spirit ended up rewarding him economically such that the boy was able to get back to school and the economic problems of both the boy and the father were gone forever. A second thread occurs with the relationship between the father and the boy. First of all, the father seemed to want his boy to succeed and live a different life than his own, and he gave the boy his savings for the boy to go to school. However, when the boy came back after the money ran out, he consistently gave negative messages to the boy, saying things like “I always said that you would never come to anything” and “Do you think I will sit with my hands lying in my lap like you?” which appears to mean that he had lost hope in his son and his abilities to succeed. The boy, however, consistently maintains a positive attitude and even at a key moment, he says: “ Dear father, don’t trouble yourself about it, if it is God’s will, it will turn to my advantage” which demonstrates that he had a strong faith in things getting better. Also, at the end the story takes a positive turn, since the boy was able to find a way out of the economic problems, but most importantly, he used the reward given by the spirit to do good deeds for others, becoming the most famous doctor in the whole world since he could heal all wounds with his plaster.

Psychological interpretation of the story

     This story has comparative tales, mainly the one about Aladdin and the magic lamp, in which a genie is released from inside a lamp by a boy, and the genie ends up giving three wishes to the boy as a reward. Also, the stories describing a father and son, or sons relationship seems to have parallel in several other stories.

     I believe one of the main psychological symbols described in the story is the hero archetype. The boy represents the hero, and he proceeds through his life and conditions with a clear optimism and without being affected by the negative or pessimistic comments of his father. As described by Samuels, “the image of the hero embodies man’s most powerful aspirations and reveals the manner in which they are ideally realized (Samuels et. al., 1986). The boy demonstrates always a good disposition on things, and his positive attitude ends up in the universe delivering fortune and all benefits to him. One very important note to me is that he maintains humility and never complaints about the need to work hard, to have limited resources, etc. and in the end he uses the gifts he received for the benefit of others, which appears to me as the real reason why he was awarded the gifts. It might be that if he would have been after fortune for his own personal benefit, he would have found himself with nothing in the end. The hero figure represents the WILL and capacity to seek and undergo repeated transformations in pursuit of WHOLENESS or MEANING (Samuels et. al., 1986).

     The character represented by the father is to me a changing archetype, symbolizing a shift between a “good” father and a “bad” father symbol, but mainly representing the symbol of a “maternal monster” giving pressure to his son, “the hero” and risking his regression (Samuels, et. al, 1986). First he seems to have a sincere interest in his son’s well being and improvement for the future when he sends his son to school by sacrificing all his savings, but later, when the son comes back home and they end up working together, the father consistently gives the boy negative feedback, and even some comments that could have affected the boy greatly, such as telling him things like “I always said that you would never come to anything”. It is only the boy’s consistent positive attitude that makes him immune to these comments.

     Finally, an important symbol in the story is that of the trickster archetype, represented by the spirit in the bottle. The spirit introduces himself in the story as Mercurius, who Jung found to have the closest resemblance to the trickster figure, “having a fondness for sly jokes and malicious pranks, power to change shape, a dual nature (half animal/half divine), the urge for unremitting exposure to privation and torture as well as an approximation to the figure of a savior” (Samuels et. al., 1986).

Since the spirit first begs to be released, and then he wants to punish his savior, the boy, to end up agreeing with the boy and delivering gifts in exchange for his second release. He falls into the boy’s game when he gets back into the bottle because he needed to demonstrate his power by doing this, without stopping to think that he was being tricked by the boy. In this particular point of the story, the boy demonstrated a level of mental sharpness as he was able to beat the spirit tricks, but also he demonstrated a level of willingness to take risks, weighing his odds and his current conditions vs. the risk of being punished by the spirit in the end. Finally, the spirit demonstrated honesty by complying with his part of the deal after being released a second time.

References

Grimm, J. & Grimm W. (1944) The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, New York, NY: Pantheon Books

Von-Franz, M.L. (1970) The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Boston, MA: Shambala Publications Inc. Samuels, A., Shorter B. & Plaut F. (1986) A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis, New York, NY: Routledge