The Feminine in Fairy Tales Quotes

“Jung writes that women with a negative mother complex often miss the first half of life; they walk past it in a dream. Life to them is a constant source of annoyance and irritation. But if they can overcome this negative mother complex, they have a good chance in the second half of rediscovering life with the youthful spontaneity missed in the first half. For though, as Jung says in the last paragraph, a part of life has been lost, its meaning has been saved. That is the tragedy of such women, but they can get to the turning point, and in the second half of life have their hands healed and can stretch them out for what they want — not from the animus or from the ego, but, according to nature, simply stretch out their hands toward something they love. Though it is infinitely simple, it is extremely difficult, for it is the one thing the woman with a negative mother complex cannot do; it needs God's help. Even the analyst cannot help her — it must one day just happen, and this is generally when there has been sufficient suffering. One cannot escape one's fate; the whole pain of it must be accepted, and one day the infinitely simple solution comes.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales

“Touchy people are proud of their sensitiveness, by which they tyrannize others. An unkind word provides tragedy for months. You cannot open your mouth because you might hurt the other person. They get into tempers over everything and sulk and are hurt in their wonderful delicate feelings; it is just plain tyranny.
Such people usually have a very vulgar hidden power complex which comes out in the shadow—an infantile attitude toward life through which those around are tyrannized. What should be a receptive, loving attitude becomes a thorny hedge, where every man who tries to penetrate gets so torn that he just retires.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales

“This is an archetypal motif: where the pearl is, there is also the dragon, and vice versa. They are never separate. Frequently, just after the first intuitive realization of the Self, the powers of desolation and darkness break in. A terrible slaughtering always takes place at the time of the birth of the hero, as for instance the killing of the innocents at Bethlehem when Christ was born. Some persecuting power starts at once to blot out the inner germ. Outwardly, it is often that the innermost kernel of the human being has an actually irritating effect upon outer surroundings. Realization of the Self when in statu nascendi, when only a hunch, makes a person unadapted and difficult for those around, for it disturbs the unconscious instinctive order. Jung often said that it is as if a flock of sheep resented it bitterly that one sheep wanted to walk by itself.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales

“Women to a great extent – and the less they knew about it, the worse it is - rule even life and death in their surroundings. If the husband dies, or the children die, very often, the woman in that family has something to do with it.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales

“In the swan-maiden motif we have a hunter who is told of a beautiful woman who first appears as a swan. It is a question of how a man can get hold of his anima: he has to notice moods and half-unconscious thoughts which appear in the background of his consciousness, and hold on to them so that they cannot just disappear again. By writing down the mood or thought, he takes its volatility away and gives it a human quality. But doing it once is not enough. Even a man who has realized what the anima is can let her slip back into her feather garment and fly out of the window.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales: Revised Edition

“Dreams either compensate for the lopsidedness of our conscious view or complement its lacunae. Fairy tales, because they are also mostly unsophisticated products of the storyteller’s unconscious, do the same. Like dreams, they help to keep our conscious attitude in a healthy balance, and have therefore a healing function. As the conscious religious views of Western Europe in the past two thousand years have not given enough expression of the feminine principle, we can expect to find an especially rich crop of archetypal feminine figures in fairy tales giving expression to the neglected feminine principle. We can also expect to retrieve from them quite a few lost goddesses of pagan antiquity.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales: Revised Edition

“Everybody,” he said, “who goes to church gets ill. You must listen to the plants and stones because God is in them, and all the rest is junk.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales

“Accettare di non essere come gli altri, e così continuare la propria strada come si sente che sia giusto, esige in realtà una grande rettitudine e molto coraggio.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales

“The alpha hen is generally the most disgusting and pushy person, and the best in I.Q.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales: Revised Edition

“They just exist.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz, The Feminine in Fairy Tales: Revised Edition