Individuation in fairy tailes

Marie-Louise von Franz

2. The Bath Bâdgerd (Persia), page 237

“That story is important because it shows that a certain “inwardness,” as Portmann calls it, combines with every biological drive. The difficulty in investigating this field is to find a way to see it, for if the animal cannot talk, how can you prove it? With us it is simple, for we know that all our biological instinctive patterns of behavior, such as sex, fighting, domination, eating, sleeping, and so on, are surrounded by an enormous amount of meaningful fantasy material. Jung writes:”

“The world of instinct, simple as it seems to the rationalist, reveals itself on the primitive level as a complicated interplay of physiological facts, taboos, rites, class-systems and tribal lore, which [and now we come to another factor] impose a restrictive form on the instinct from the beginning, preconsciously, and make it serve a higher purpose.”

“That is one of the great problems of modern man and one of the main reasons why moderns, especially rationalistically trained people, resist the unconscious and their own instinctive nature. They assume that if they let go, it would be like a stone rolling down the mountainside to the bottom of the sea. If once they let go of their ethical or rationalistic or other inhibitions, they would absolutely lose control. Actually this is so if the instinctive basis is not sound or has been repressed for a long time. Then naturally there is an explosion. But under normal circumstances, and if one gives in with a certain elastic wisdom, not letting go all at once, one soon discovers that what one thought would lead into measureless nonsense does not do so, or there is an inner spiritual brake built into every instinctive drive, which controls it naturally from within. Jung continues:”

The primary connection between image and instinct explains the interdependence of instinct and religion in the most general sense. These two spheres are in mutually compensatory relationship, and by “instinct” we must understand not merely “eros” but everything that goes by the name of “instinct”. “Religion” on the primitive level means the psychic regulatory system that is coordinated with the dynamism of instinct. On a higher level [and this touches our story and concerns it] this primary interdependence is sometimes lost, and then religion can easily become an antidote to instinct, whereupon the originally compensatory relationship degenerates into conflict, religion petrifies into formalism [the parrot], and instinct is vitiated. A split of this kind is not due to a mere accident, nor is it a meaningless catastrophe. It lies rather in the nature of the evolutionary process itself, in the increasing extension and differentiation of consciousness. For just as there is no energy without the tension of opposites, so there can be no consciousness without the perception of differences. But any stronger emphasis of differences leads to a polarity and finally to a conflict which maintains the necessary tension of opposites”