The fairy tale is the great mother of the novel, and has even more universal validity than the most

avidly read novel of your time, and you know that what has been on everyone's lips for millennia,

though repeated endlessly, still comes nearest to the ultimate human truth.

Most people think of fairy tales as stories for children, but according to Carl Jung, they are also a rich source of wisdom regarding the human condition.

Jung's friend and colleague, Marie-Louise von Franz, spent much of her career studying fairy tales, and she discovered that the themes of these stories can help us understand the nature of our psyche and cope with

the timeless challenges of human existence. In this video we explore some of the practical

wisdom embedded in fairy tales. The contents of our mind, according to Jung, are not solely the product

of personal experience. Rather, in addition to personal elements such as our memories and idiosyncratic aspects of our personality,

there is a collective stratum of the psyche which is shared by all of humanity, and which Jung called the collective unconscious.

This realm is composed of inherited patterns of psychological functioning known as archetypes.

The archetypes shape the way we experience the environment and other people,

influence our emotional states, and motivate us to take certain courses of action and to abstain from others.

Because they dwell in the unconscious, archetypes cannot be observed directly.

Their existence is revealed through the symbolic images and motifs that they produce in consciousness.

Or as Jung explained, archetypes, so far as we can observe and experience them at all, manifest themselves only through their ability to organize images and ideas.

And this is always an unconscious process which cannot be detected until afterwards.

Religious symbols are among the richest sources of archetypal activity,

but because they arise in specific cultural epochs and are interpreted through its moral systems

and the institutions that govern a religion, the messages of these symbols are often distorted.

Fairy tales, in contrast, remain largely free of such cultural distortion.

As they were born from the imagination of ordinary people, passed down through oral tradition,

and not bound to institutions or used as instruments of power,

...