A King and Queen struggle to help their daughter who has a mysterious illness. Based on an old folk-tale. Part of our series to explore psychology through film. An early animated film.
If you entered into this story, what part feels the most familiar? Where are you at in this story right now? What part are you living?
Fairy tale characters & their constellations are divested of all personal trappings, thus in them unconscious processes can be seen in their typical forms. The psychology of the unconscious can learn a great deal from fairy tales since they describe essential human archetypal phenomena. Carl Jung went so far as to define fairy tales as the anatomy of the psyche.
– Psychotherapist Mario Jacoby
Explore Psychology Through Films – Analysis of The Telling Tale
If you haven’t watched the film yet, SPOILERS ARE BELOW. The film is above.
We first heard this story from Michael Meade’s fantastic podcast, Living Myth.
A young girl has a toy ball, her dearest possession. The young heroine in the Frog Prince also plays with a ball at the start of the story. The orb in our film is a marble, an even more magical ball that reflects, has colors and dimensions. Marie Louise Von Franz discusses the symbolism of the ball in her analysis of “The Three Feathers.”
The symbol of a ball would represent more the capacity of the Self to effect movement out of itself….That is why so often in fairy tales the hero follows a rolling apple or a rolling sphere to some mysterious goal. He just follows this spontaneous self-impulsiveness of his own psyche to the secret goal.
(from “Introduction to Fairy Tales”)
Our heroine, like many children, has access to an inner vitality that comes from the deep center of her Self. She still has the innocence and openness to follow her ball wherever it leads her. It leads her where she must go – into the dark and dangerous forest.
Fairy tales are often dark and menacing because the inner life of children is filled with monsters and scary situations. Fairy tales offer guidance.
The deep inner conflicts originating in our primitive drives and our violent emotions are all denied in much of modern children’s literature, and so the child is not helped in coping with them. But the child is subject to desperate feelings of loneliness and isolation, and he often experiences mortal anxiety.
More often than not, he is unable to express these feelings in words, or he can do so only by indirection: fear of the dark, of some animal, anxiety about his body… The fairy tale is future-oriented and guides the child—in terms he can understand in both his conscious and his unconscious mind—to relinquish his infantile dependency wishes and achieve a more satisfying independent existence.
Bruno Bettleheim, “The Uses of Enchantment”
Most adults I know (including myself) are still working on these issues, which is why fairy tales can also offer guidance for us.
The dark forest, our own unknown, unconscious Nature, beckons. Traveling to (and through) the collective unconscious, and our own hidden Self is where we all eventually must travel.
In this tale, there is no heroic fight with a monster. Instead, the heroine goes unconscious. Tales like Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and The Elves and the Shoemaker, also feature heroes that go to sleep. Sometimes waiting and resting is the right move. Sometime fighting our inner predicament isn’t the best action.
The parents find the child and bring her to a healer who teaches the family about the power of the truth to release us from sickness or being under a spell. I love this tale because it functions on several levels. The literal telling of secrets offers healing to families, or even nations (South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission offers a powerful example of this).
As the parents (and even the wounded healer) reveal their truths, the child regains her ability to see, hear, and move.
Internally, we can also admit unwelcome truths and free ourselves from the symptoms that come from repressing our own truths from ourselves.
The tale ends with great rejoicing, but also a new dilemma. How are we to live with the knowledge of our shadow selves, or the family secrets newly discovered. The monk reminds the family that “truth is a powerful potion.” While speaking truth to others and ourselves is vital for health, we are reminded to be gentle so that we aren’t overwhelmed and go unconscious again.