You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt, and today I'm pleased to have with me in the studio, Robert Bly and Marion Woodman,

who together have constituted a book called The Maiden King, the Reunion of Masculine and Feminine.

It is an analysis of these relations between the male and female

principles as it begins by being embodied in a Russian folk tale known as the Maiden King or more

particularly as the Maiden Tsar. And I wanted to ask, first of all,

how this, of all of the many folk tales and Baba Yaga stories,

came to be the one that you chose to interpret.

I think we felt that it was very contemporary in its way of looking at things, Michael.

And there were so many symbols and metaphors that seemed to relate to things that were happening around us.

And as we looked at the entire story and saw the

movement from the false self to a real soul journey, we were really interested in seeing

what that might look like in terms of our society. Now, why a fairy tale, Robert, and why Russian?

Well, those are good questions for me.

A fairy tale and folk tale are very different.

A folk tale is something like Johnny Appleseed, which grows out of the ground.

But to me, it's very likely that there were great, great psychologists before Freud and Young

and Karen Horny and all the rest.

And they lived two, three thousand years ago.

...