When you first read a fairy tale you may think that it is just a simple story, but through a psychologist’s mind a tale can be interpreted in many different ways and help better understand the human mind. Through these interpretations there were many underlying messages found throughout many fairy tales. One of the most influential psychologists that have interpreted fairy tales is Sigmund Freud. Freud believed that when something bad happens to a person such as being hurt by their father when they are younger can make them fear men, so when they read a fairy tale these repressed memories that are stored in your subconscious can be revealed. Freud could have a person retell a fairy tale and the person may skip the part in the fairy tale where the character gets hurt by a father figure. They often use fairy tales in this method during psychotherapy to bring out such repressed memories. During Dr. Mazeroff’s lecture he talked about the parts of personality. These parts were also another theory of Freud’s and he uses them to help better understand fairy tales. The first part is the ID. This is where a person’s basic thoughts come out.
The second part is the ego, which helps you negotiate what is going on in the real world and the last part is the super ego. The super ego helps people determine if what they are about to do is right or wrong. Although Freud used these theories to better understand the mind and fairy tales it is really up to the reader to how they interpret them. To conclude I’ll leave you with a quote that Dr. Mazeroff told the class about, which is that “the best explanation for a fairy tale is a fairy tale”, so it is best to keep an open mind when reading them.
No comments:
Post a Comment