ANATOMY OF A FAIRY TALE
The mysterious world of fairy tales is the world of our childhood. Fairy tales have come down to us over the centuries, even over millennia, and have crossed mountains, rivers, and continents on their way. They originated in myths or legends, underwent transformations in the course of their oral transmission, were passed on from one culture to another, and refer to universal themes deeply rooted in the human experience. Our reception of fairy tales today and the selection of stories we have access to is in large part due to the existence of printed books. Even more, it is owing to the work of the Grimm brothers and others like them who collected folklore and conferred upon it a new relevance. At least in urban areas, the art of story-telling was lost and the printed collections of fairy tales became a central element of child rearing for the educated bourgeoisie. The stories were intended to impart moral and pedagogical values, but were at the same time anchored in an archaic world that had the potential to bewilder a child and stir up its psyche. The enigmatic laws that govern the fairy tale world speak to us out of the distant past and convey encoded messages. These stories are hardly harmless tales, rather they are a key to the very depths of human consciousness – the field of psychoanalysis has reaped rich rewards in its investigations of this ancient lore. The tension between reality and fantasy, as it exists in the fairy tale, has largely been exorcised from our modern everyday existence, but fantasy is an inherent constituent of our being, a fact which explains why even today fairy tales do not leave us cold: on the contrary, they tell us much about our story, our origin, and what motivates us.