The Orphan Within: Understanding Why We Feel We Don’t Belong

Orphan (1895) by Albert Gebhard (1869-1937) Source: Finnish National Gallery / Public Domain for Orphan Within blog post

 

Once upon a time, when I was a child in bed at night, I would fantasize that the grownups asleep in the other bedroom were not my real parents. I imagined that I had been an orphan abandoned at birth, and they had adopted me. This was a story I created to express feeling different from the rest of my family and alone in the world.

The reality of orphanhood is a tragic fate, one we see proliferating around the world in response to the crises of war, famine, and poor healthcare for women. It can have severe and lasting impact, as many studies have shown.[i]  But orphanhood also has a psychological dimension: it is a universal archetypal pattern in the human psyche. According to the theories of Carl Jung, archetypes belong to our collective unconscious, not just to individuals.

Our fascination with orphans shows up in cultures across time and place. Some of the earliest stories we learn are about orphans. The orphan Moses became a leader of his people. The twins Romulus and Remus, said to be raised by wolves, founded the city of Rome. The list of folk tales, mythological stories, movies, and works of literature that feature orphans is extensive: Batman, Superman, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Oliver Twist, Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Jane Eyre, Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, and many others. These figures are marked by an unfortunate beginning that propels them on a heroic journey. In these stories, the original adversity impels them to develop courage and emotional resilience. Without the support and nurturance of the family, the symbolic orphan must develop his or her own skills for survival.

To be an orphan is to be alone in the world, to be bereft of a mother, father, or both. [Contrary to traditional usage, the United Nations uses “orphan” to describe a child who has lost either one or both parents; “maternal orphan,” “paternal orphan,” and “double orphan” describe a child who has lost its mother, father, or both parents respectively.][ii] Orphanhood as a psychological phenomenon relates to an inner state of abandonment. If rage is the emotion of powerlessness[iii], loneliness and loss are the emotions of the orphan. We can experience the orphan archetype without being one in reality, as was my childhood experience.

When children appear in dreams or when we dream of our child self, the child figure(s) can represent aspects of self we have ignored or forgotten but now want to know.  These qualities often relate to innocence, curiosity, spontaneity. In her book, The Inner Child in Dreams, Jungian analyst Kathrin Asper suggests the following questions when working with the inner child in dreams:

  • How do I appear in my dreams, as a child or as an adult?
  • What are the children in my dreams up to?
  • How do I treat children in my dreams?
  • How do other dream figures treat them?
  • How do parents and other authority figures appear?[iv]

Our dreams show us what is at work in our unconscious mind, the stories that shape us but are unknown to our waking selves.

The orphan within carries the feelings of not fitting in, of not belonging, of being different from the herd. She suffers from a yearning that cannot be fulfilled from the outside. Her suffering is not the result of being parentless but of being cut off from her own capacity to care for herself. The orphan within waits in a hidden corner of our unconscious to be rescued by our attention and love. When we ignore our needs in favor of the needs of others, when we reject parts of ourselves because of fear or shame, when we disown a natural desire to be seen, praised, admired, we create an intrapsychic environment for internal orphans.[v]

We can also feel orphaned by a collective group. In this time of polarization in our country, many people are expressing feelings of abandonment by political leaders or parties, and by the government. Carl Jung described a cultural complex as a shared set of unconscious beliefs, attitudes, and emotions. More recently. Jungian analyst Thomas Singer has elaborated on this: “Large scale social complexes form in the layer of the cultural unconscious of groups and become cultural complexes. . .. [which] can be defined as emotionally charged aggregates of ideas and images that tend to cluster around an archetypal core and are shared by individuals within an identified collective.”[vi]

Cultural complexes shape our identity, our sense of belonging, lifestyle, and values. When our personal identity and values are at odds with the prevailing cultural environment, we feel rejected, betrayed and orphaned.

Becoming aware of these inner orphan dynamics can bring healing to the loneliness and sorrow of the lost child. First, it’s necessary to acknowledge her existence and name the burden she bears. Feelings serve as portals to self-knowledge and awareness.  The orphans in the myths and stories had helpers. Moses’s sister, Miriam, watched over the basket with the infant Moses in it until the Pharaoh’s daughter found it downriver. Romulus and Remus were nurtured by wolves. Cinderella had her fairy godmother, and Luke Skywalker was aided by Obi-Wan-Kenobi and Yoda. When we turn to our inner wounded one with compassion, patience, and curiosity, we become our own Yoda.

[i] Nelson, C.A.; Fox, N.A.; Zeanah, C. H., “Romania’s Abandoned Children: The Effects of Early Profound Psychosocial Deprivation on the Course of Human Development,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, Volume 32, Issue 6, October 27, 2023

[ii] The 2008 UN Global AIDS Report, p. 13

[iii] Nunamann, Kaitlin, LICSW, RYT, “The Truth About Anger,” Psychology Today, January 25, 2023

[iv]Asper, Kathrin, The Inner Child of Dreams, Shambhala (2001), p.34

[v] Punnett, Audrey, The Orphan: A Journey to Wholeness. Fisher King Press (2014).

[vi] Singer, Thomas, with Catherine Kaplinsky, “The Cultural Complex,” in Jungian Psychanalysis: Working in the Spirit of C. G. Jung, edited by Murray Stein. Open Court Publishing (2010) pp 22-37.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at Transcending the Past.

If you found this post interesting, you may also want to read “Soulwork: The Role Archetypes Play in Jungian Analysis,” “Mothers, Witches, and the Power of Archetypes,” and “Fathers: Heroes, Villains, and Our Need for Archetypes.”

Keep up with everything Dale is doing by subscribing to her newsletter, Exploring the Unknown in Mind and Heart.



Our Mothers, Ourselves: the Search for the Whole Story

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe for Mothers blog post

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.

She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.

She gave them some broth without any bread;

And whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.

How entrancing those nonsensical rhymes were to us as children, the chant more compelling than the meaning. As adults, however, we hear the verses with more mature ears and try to divine their symbolic meaning.

What about the mother portrayed in the Mother Goose rhyme? Her origins may be traced to Queen Caroline, wife of King George II, and her large brood, or the rhyme may refer to an ancient superstition linking fertility to shoes. But even if the poor, old, overburdened woman is a stand-in for a real person, she also represents the archetype of a harried worn-out mother, her children starving for attention and love. As an archetypal image of an unfit mother, she reflects a set of conditions that exist across time and continents, as does the depiction of her childrens’ desperate situation.

Cultural images of a range of mothers and mothering abound. Consider the haranguing critical mother-in-the-sky in “Oedipus Wrecks,” Woody Allen’s segment of the film New York Stories. A female deity with tight curls and a kvetching voice, Sadie Millstein is the intrusive and unescapable mother from Hell, a Medea in her own right. On the opposite end of the spectrum are the all-good mothers, Margaret March, “Marmee,” in Little Women, or the self-sacrificing mother in Fanny Hurst’s novel Imitation of Life. Dickens gives us the negligent Mrs. Copperfield, and Mrs. Jellby in Bleak House. Jane Austen’s Mrs. Bennet is a loving mother but a social climbing fool. As we age, witches and hags, fairy godmothers and cuddling mamas tramp through our dreams.

We tell stories about our own mothers—to ourselves, to friends, to our partners and our therapists, but are the stories we repeat the whole picture? Whether our mothers were vicious or supportive, praising or blaming; whether we consider them a benevolent or malicious force, our mothers were our first love. As our earliest and most primary relationship, the way we attach to our mothers in infancy will shape how we respond to love the rest of our lives.

Understanding our mothers as complex figures free daughters to accept their undiscovered or disowned parts. The often painful quest to sort through the past and to explore who our mothers were beyond the stories we’ve told ourselves can satisfy an unconscious yearning for wholeness within ourselves.

Fountain of Goddess of Ephesus for Mothers blog postIn her book, In Her Image: The Unhealed Daughter’s Search for Her Mother, Jungian analyst Kathie Carlson invites the reader to dive deeper into the complex relationship between mothers and daughters and to consider that relationship in a fuller context that goes beyond personal experience. Carlson differentiates three points of view from which we can understand our mothers: the child’s, the feminist, the archetypal.

Carlson begins with the woman who raised us, our personal mother: “The primary relationship between women is the relationship of mother and daughter. This relationship is the birthplace of a woman’s ego identity, her sense of security in the world, her feeling about herself, her body, and other women.” Mother is The Source. She is our container, our protectress, the vital entity in which we grow, through which we are born, and upon which our survival depends. (I am speaking here, too, of transgendered women, of men who take on the primary caretaker role of “mother”). As mother, she holds our life and death in her hands. A problem arises, however, when an adult daughter continues to view her mother from the child’s perspective, when she evaluates the mother in terms of how she affects her (the child), expecting the mother to be all things “supportive, nurturing, unselfish, and infinitely caring,” qualities that suppose a super-human flawless being.

Carlson suggests the child’s point of view is egocentric and limited, but necessarily so when we are infants and children. As infants, we need to establish a bond with an all-powerful presence who will appear when we wail in hunger and who can fulfill our basic needs. The degree to which we have missed out on quality mothering is mirrored in the physical and emotional distress that may emerge as we develop. In extreme cases of negligence or abuse, children are vulnerable to a condition called failure to thrive (FTT).

Kali trampling Shiva for Mothers blog postA problem arises when we carry the developmental needs and expectations of childhood into adulthood and continue to suffer the rage or depression engendered by early deprivation. “Many of us,” Carlson writes, “have not had even adequate mothering, much less the ideal; many of our mothers have been too depleted themselves. We end up disappointed in our mothers, hurt, angry, blaming, needy, raging, yet unable to let go of our need for them. We feel starved emotionally…We feel terrified of becoming like our mothers…”

As Carlson notes, many carry within us this unhealed child and an attendant sense of unworthiness, which affects our other relationships. Healing the core woundedness, she explains, involves a deeper and more comprehensive view of our mothers, one that does not negate the child’s view but includes looking at our mothers as women with their own histories, needs, and temperaments as well as expanding our understanding of our mother as part of a transpersonal order.

If the first perspective from which we see our mothers is the child’s egocentric view, the second perspective is what Carlson calls a feminist perspective, and what I call a woman-to-woman perspective. From this viewpoint, our mothers are products of their histories, their biology, their culture, their temperament and genes. Seeing our mothers through this lens allows us to replace the ideal projected image with a more realistic and empathetic knowledge of who our mother really is. This is not to say an abused, neglected, or mistreated daughter denies or excuses wrongful mothering, only that by seeing her mother as a full human being for whom she can feel sympathy, the daughter is more able to separate from her mother and to feel compassion for her own deeply held pain.

The third perspective Carlson introduces in her book is the experience of the archetypal or transpersonal mother who “comes through” to us in dreams and religious symbols, in Mother Nature, and in experiences that help us reframe our emotional connection to our personal mothers. A way to understand how archetypes work in our lives is to imagine that all aspects of all mothers are contained in the collective archetype of Mother. She who is named the Shekhinah, the feminine complement to God; the Great Huntress; the Queen of Heaven; Hera; Astarte; Sophia; the Madonna; Kali; Lilith.

If, for instance, we have felt abandoned by our personal mothers or have felt her meanness and betrayal, we can look to the ancient stories and symbols that depict both the light and dark sides of the Mother. Knowing this, we are more able to relativize our personal experience. We do not deny or excuse the pain or the perpetrators of that pain, but we can feel less isolated, less bitter and resentful knowing our pain is part of the continuum of the human condition.

The Return of Persephone for Mothers blog postAs an interesting experiment, we can gather tales that speak to us of our experiences as the daughter of our mother. Do we identify with the abandoned and orphaned Little Match Girl, or the under-appreciated object of jealousy, Cinderella? Perhaps we feel closer to Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, who is separated from her mother by Hades, and dragged into the underworld. Perhaps there are more contemporary stories that resonate with ours. In any case, find stories that reflect your own experience and think how the story might be told first from the daughter’s point of view, and then differently, from the mother’s point of view. Imagine hearing Mrs. Portnoy’s worried voice narrating the trouble she sees ahead for little Alexander! What might you learn about yourself if you heard your own mother’s whole story?

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 



Fathers: Heroes, Villains, and Our Need for Archetypes

Atticus Finch for Fathers blog post

When the first plane hit the World Trade Center in Manhattan, I was standing on a pier in northern Wisconsin. The day couldn’t have been lovelier. Or more serene. A clear blue sky, the light gloriously golden on a perfect fall day.

The summer folks had left the lake by then. The quiet, for this working author, was a balm. Then the phone rang. It was my husband telling me that a plane had crashed into one of the towers. They did not know what had happened yet, he said, but probably something was wrong with the plane. He told me not to worry and to go back to my writing.

We had no television at our cabin. As soon as I hung up, I turned on the radio. Ten minutes later, the second plane hit. It was the beginning of a national trauma. I immediately packed and began the four-hour drive back to Madison.

FDR Day of Infamy speech for Fathers blog postHere is where fatherhood comes in. During that entire ride home, I kept the radio on, waiting for my President’s voice to assure me that this was not the end of the world. I later learned that George W. Bush did broadcast a brief statement from the school in Florida where he had been reading to children. But for some reason, I never heard it on my radio.

The silence I experienced from our president during those long anxious hours driving home has stayed with me. I was reminded of how FDR’s inspiring words after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor not only shaped America’s destiny but reassured an entire nation of its strength and purpose. Churchill in Britain during the blitz, Gandhi in India fighting for independence from colonial rule, Mandela in South Africa, these are the associations that come to mind when we think of national heroes as strong father figures. To be sure, the same human flaws afflicted them that afflict the rest of us, but over time idealized versions of these men persist. They have come to represent the virtues of courage, fortitude, wisdom, and benevolent authority, values that most cultures deem positive and necessary for the continuation of the state.

On the day of the 9/11 attack and during the months that followed, I found myself longing for just such a father figure, one who could assure me that not only did our government have the skills and wisdom to deal with the frightening prospect of terrorism, but also that I could continue to believe in our common humanity and our democratic institutions.

Angling by Caillebotte for Fathers blog postThe projection of values onto a national figure parallels how we project values and qualities onto the most important and guiding presences in our personal lives, our own mothers and fathers. What is projected or placed onto another individual by our unconscious reflects the values of our specific time and place as well as our psychology. A child growing up in eighteenth-century England, for instance, could expect a model of fathering quite different from a child growing up in eighteenth-century Polynesia. Likewise, today, the diversity of fathering styles emerges from the diversity within a culture.

Yet, certain eternal structures within the human psyche – archetypes – exist across cultures and transcend time and place. In The Father: Contemporary Jungian Perspectives, psychoanalyst Andrew Samuels notes that the archetypal father is not restricted to personal experience: “The idea is that, behind the personal father whom we know and to whom we relate, lies an innate psychological structure which influences the way we experience him.”

In classical Jungian terms, the mother archetype is characterized by nurturing, containing, and generative qualities, while the father archetype is assumed to be a more active and aggressive principle dominated by intellect and will. This duality, which current gender issues may question, is nonetheless reflected in our myths and language, and our view of the cosmos. We say Mother Earth (Gaia), Father Sky (Kronos, Zeus, Yahweh); we speak of Eros (Soul) and Logos (Spirit). During the Third Reich, Nazi propaganda favored calling Germany the Fatherland (Vaterland). By contrast, Russians often refer to their country, affectionately, as the Motherland. Why a country should be referred to as one parent or the other may represent our differing expectations of mother and father. The former implies care, belonging, family, benevolence; the latter, order, discipline, masculine strength.

King Lear for Fathers blog postNot every male leader who becomes a father figure is a hero. An alarming number of kings, dictators, presidents, and the like, embody the shadow qualities of the archetype. Historians have accounted for Hitler’s rise to power by his uncanny understanding and manipulation of the desperation and dissatisfaction of many German citizens. If his determination to restore Germany to its former glory won him adoration as a worthy and strong father figure, his inhumanity toward Jews and others expressed a collective need to blame others/outsiders for the country’s troubles. Cult leaders such as Jim Jones, Charles Manson, or David Koresh also took on the status of father figures, playing out on a grand scale the violent, destructive, and anti-social aspects of the father archetype. These men are our abusive fathers writ large.

Whether we think of our fathers as heroes, villains, or just ordinary guys, they (or father substitutes) play a crucial role in our psychological development by presenting a crucial and necessary complement to the bonding relationship with mother. Mothers provide the breast for nourishment, but in our ancestral history fathers were necessary to ensure the survival of offspring. They provided protection from predators and alternative sources of food. In the postmodern world, most mothers work, whether tending crops or in an office. Father as sole breadwinner is no longer an accurate description of his family role. On their website, Parents As Teachers, William Scott and Amy De La Hurt cite the following research on the important role of fathers in raising young children.

  • Early involvement by fathers in the primary care of their child is a source of emotional security for the child (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2011).
  • Fathers’ affectionate treatment of their infants contributes to high levels of secure attachment (Rosenberg & Wilcox, 2006).
  • Children who have close relationships with their fathers have high self-esteem and are less likely to be depressed (Dubowitz et al., 2001).
  • When fathers acknowledge their child’s emotional response and help them address it with a problem-solving approach, the children score higher on tests of emotional intelligence (Civitas, 2001).

Darth Vader and Luke for Fathers blog postFatherhood and fathering are receiving more attention from psychologists these days.  Economic and sociological changes, more working mothers, more single mothers among them, have put many fathers in the role of primary or shared-time caregiver. Decades ago, a father in the delivery room was unheard of. Now it is a common practice. Fathers can participate in the pregnancy through classes and instructions on everything from birthing techniques to the specifics of breastfeeding. Cultural changes concerning gender identity and same-sex marriage will continue to precipitate changes in how we parent.

In many places around the world, people believe their parents live on as spirits after they’ve died. Through ritual and ceremony, these wisdom figures return to the living to offer advice, supply ancestral memory, or intervene with the gods. For some of us, our fathers have become inner figures who aid and support our journey into maturity. On the level of inner development, we can work with forgiveness and compassion, and form a new relationship to a father who may have been a source of pain. Absent or present, dead or alive, our fathers have shaped who we are.

Here is a beautiful poem by Robert Hayden written by a son, now a grown man, remembering his father with love and remorse.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with crack hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at 



How Snow White and Her Cruel Stepmother Help Us Cope with Evil

Queen evil stepmother post

“Mirror mirror on the wall, who in this land is fairest of all?”

Whether we first heard these words read to us as a bedtime story, or in a darkened theater, enthralled by the Disney version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, (where it was actually “Magic mirror on the wall,” although most people remember it otherwise), the queen’s imperious question casts a spell. We know trouble will soon follow. Even the littlest girls get it and hold their breath in anticipation and concern. “Fairest of all” shocks us with its competitive edge, touching a core part of our feminine selves. Attractiveness, it presumes, determines our status and value as a female. Beauty, we will come to understand, is an asset, but also a curse.

Queen and mirror for Stepmother evil postVanity and envy are the twin engines that drive the story of “Sneewittchen,” the title used by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm when they recorded the folktale in 1812. It became “Little Snow-White” in English translations based on the Grimms’ final 1857 version of the tale. Most fairy tales originate as oral stories repeated over generations and reflect older strata of cultural development when humans lived closer to nature and the membrane between the real and the imagined was more porous. Birds spoke to humans, the wind was a spirit, and giants trod the earth. The collected fairy tales we know today are a distillation of many iterations, the product of countless imaginations told by many tellers. But despite their ancient origins, fairy tales remain relevant to our postmodern selves and depict the dramas of the human soul, one of which is the confrontation with evil. This frequent motif reflects our experiences with destructive forces symbolized by giants, trolls, witches and monsters. The tales suggest ways to recognize and discern good from evil and provide solutions to life-threatening challenges.

Drupsteen Queen for Stepmother Evil postFairy tales set down no single way to deal with evil. In some stories, the heroine outsmarts the opposition, as Gretel does in “Hansel and Gretel” when she pushes the witch into her own oven. In other tales, flattery wins over the devil; in others, a physical battle is required. Sometimes the hero, aided by magical helpers, must become invisible so as not to be seen by the enemy or must simply fly away. In fairy tales characters are typological rather than psychological. They encapsulate known “types” rather than individuals—the king, the queen, the fisherman and his greedy wife, the selfish sisters, the abandoned child. This makes it easy to identify victims and perpetrators.

By taking a closer look at these absolute types, we can spot what roles have dominated our psyches.

Evil is a source of suffering, but enduring suffering brings with it a new level of consciousness, a mature personality, and if we are lucky, wisdom. Fairy tales often begin with a state of deficiency. The king has died or the queen is barren or the poor miller has no money. A crisis ensues that begets suffering, symbolic of psychological pain. The hero or heroine takes up the task to resolve the crisis and end the suffering; radical transformation is in the making. Just so, crises in our own lives can precipitate a search for meaning and a transformation of self.

Peddler Witch for Evil Stepmother postIn “Little Snow-White,” a stepdaughter is persecuted by a stepmother for having something the latter wants: youth and beauty. As in real life, envy provides the fuel for ruthless behavior. In the case of Snow White, the envier demands nothing less than the total annihilation of the envied one.

The D. L Ashliman translation of the 1857 version of “Little Snow-White opens this way:

Once upon a time in midwinter, when the snowflakes were falling like feathers from heaven, a queen sat sewing at her window, which had a frame of black ebony wood. As she sewed she looked up at the snow and pricked her finger with her needle. Three drops of blood fell into the snow. The red on the white looked so beautiful that she thought to herself, “If only I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood in this frame.

Soon afterward she had a little daughter who was as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as ebony wood, and therefore they called her Little Snow-White. And as soon as the child was born, the queen died.

The opening scene occurs in winter when life is buried under a layer of coldness. A wistful mother longs for a child, a daughter like herself. She pricks her finger and drops of blood splatter on the frozen ground, hinting at an ominous situation to come. We soon learn that when the child is born, the mother dies. Here, then, is the deficiency at the beginning of the tale: the absent mother and the motherless child. We are next told that the king, now mentioned for the first time, has taken another wife, “a proud and arrogant” woman. The new queen is Snow White’s stepmother.

In fairy tale language, the stepmother embodies traits we associate with evil: rage, envy, jealousy, greed, self-absorption, cunning cleverness, and uncanny powers. Rarely do we meet a kindly stepmother, for like all fairy tale figures, the stepmother is an archetypal symbol not an illustration of a real individual whose feelings, emotions, and thoughts we are privy to. The wicked stepmother contains all that we fear and loathe in the feminine, a female devil whose diabolical nature and brutality frighten us. Unlike her male counterparts, the monsters and Bluebeards who inhabit other tales and engage in bloody combat and wizardry, the witch/stepmother’s weapons of choice are more devious— gossip, poison, and directing others to do her dirty work. Her power to bewitch and the inexhaustible amount of energy she expends to carry out her nasty wishes is the stuff of nightmares. She is the hag on a broomstick, mad Bertha locked in the attic in Bronte’s Jane Eyre; she is Cruella De Vil. In fact, in a 2014 UK survey, one-third of the 2,000 adults polled voted the Evil Queen in “Snow White” to be “the scariest fairy tale character of all time.”

Dwarfs remove comb for Evil Stepmother postAs a universal figure, the witch or stepmother or evil-doing woman reappears in fairy tales across time and continents. That she is a mother and cruel engenders in us a peculiar dread. The wicked mother figure presents a paradox: if we are to survive childhood, we need our mothers to nurture us, but the evil mother wishes to devour our being. We fear her ravenous desire for power, her one-sided narcissism and obsessive nature as we fear our own hunger for power and rage, the split-off and dissociated qualities in ourselves C. G. Jung called our shadow, those despised parts of self we project onto others. In psychological terms, the denial of what is most troubling in us is a primitive defense mechanism that strives to keep us ignorant of what we are unwilling to face. In “Snow White” we have the positive and negative aspects of the feminine self. While the queen is “all bad,” Snow White is too good, too pure, too innocent, and thus unable to discern the evil in her midst. Psychologically speaking, the unacknowledged dark forces within her have been projected onto her stepmother. However, being “the good one” does not prevent suffering; in her regressed childlike state, Snow White is vulnerable; she fails the test of each of the three temptations offered by the queen, and becomes immured in a glass coffin.

Fairy tales and dreams share a compensatory function in alerting us to unconscious elements in our psyches. The witchy woman in our dreams may well symbolize some stifled, raging, but unrecognized part of ourselves. The stepmother stands in contradistinction to “the good mother” whose qualities lie on the other end of the spectrum. The “good mother” is all loving, giving, caring, beautiful, kind. But she is often too passive, too innocent, or too weary to protect her child. In this tale as in many others, the good mother dies at the outset, leaving the daughter the task of having to find the path to maturity.

For Snow White, the death of her real mother and the arrival of a stepmother appears to portend disaster, but the challenges presented by the new queen’s cruelty are actually good news for Snow White. As Terri Windling notes in her wonderful blog post “Snow, Glass, Apples: The Story of Snow White,” “Unlike sons who set off to win their fortune, who are journeying toward adventure, the daughters are outcasts, running away. The princes usually return at the end of the story, bringing treasure and magical brides. Princesses do not return; they must forge new lives, new alliances.”

By forcing her to leave home, grow up, and discover who she is, the stepmother’s malevolence moves our heroine along the path to self-discovery and resilience ending in her psychological growth. The cruel queen makes three attempts to kill her competition, and with each attempt the younger woman is seduced by her own desire and narcissism, accepting the laces, poisoned comb, and ultimately the poisoned apple from the disguised queen. Until she faces the existence of evil and her own naiveté, Snow White will remain a child.

If you’d like to chew on one aspect of this story, consider this:  “Little Snow White” is a story about emotional development set in motion by the arrival of evil. The tale has a satisfying ending: the evil queen dances herself “to death in red-hot iron shoes.” Yet we must remember: we have the evil to thank for the plot twists that lead to Snow White’s awakening. In stories as in life, evil sometimes gets the ball rolling. Without the evil stepmother, there would be no story.

Dance for us! Marcel Mercado http://www.marcelmercado.com evil stepmother post

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at

If you found this post interesting, you may also want to read “Write Your Own Fairy Tale,” “Given Away: The Plight of the Wounded Feminine,” and “The Hero’s Journey in the Time of COVID.”

Keep up with everything Dale is doing by subscribing to her newsletter, Exploring the Unknown in Mind and Heart.



The Hero’s Night Sea Journey: Lunar Consciousness in Where The Wild Things Are

Where The Wild Things Are cover for post on lunar consciousness

Late one rainy afternoon, while I was organizing my bookshelves, I discovered a copy of Maurice Sendak’s award-winning picture book, Where The Wild Things Are. On the cover was the well-remembered curious creature, part monster (claws, horns, gigantic in size and girth), part human with its dreamy, endearing smile and clean, unhairy man-feet.

It’s a quiet night in the monster’s world. Not a breeze stirs the palm trees under which he dozes, the brightening night sky still dominated by stars. Opposite the sleeping monster a lone sailboat is anchored in a churning river, but no human sailor is in sight.

Child and adult readers alike understand what these images convey: open the book and you too sail into a fantastic world in which known entities – trees, sailboats, moon and stars – coexist with the shapes of things unknown. We have inhabited this territory all our lives, since most nights we too are stirred when our unconscious minds generously initiate and guide us into the unfamiliar and sublime realm of dreams.

Murray Stein for post on lunar consciousnessIn his book, Minding the Self, renowned Jungian analyst Murray Stein describes what he calls solar and lunar consciousness, the former relating to our everyday waking consciousness, the latter referring to the unconscious realm of imagination and dreams. Stein writes:

“The dreaming mind is autonomous and free of the waking ego’s controlling influences. In dreams, the ‘I’ figure is one character among others in the dramas, and not the controlling center. In normal waking consciousness, the ego’s position is quite different, usually central. In what we may call solar consciousness, to distinguish from lunar consciousness, the ego is the center of consciousness and holds the levers of control. . . . Solar consciousness can proceed by logical thinking rather than by association, metaphor and image.”

In contrast, the movement of the lunar mind is through musing and reverie that may playfully juxtapose associative images to bring about a new sense of meaning which eludes the ego/solar conscious mind. “In alchemy,” writes Stein, “Sol and Luna are brother and sister. For depth psychology, solar and lunar minds are seen as complimentary aspects of a single entity, the mind as a whole.”

It is into this world of lunar consciousness that Sendak invites us to join him.

Douris Cup from Vatican for post on lunar consciousness

At the core of the story is the archetype of transformation young Max undergoes during the mythopoeic adventure of a night sea journey. Jung writes in The Psychology of the Transference, “The night sea journey is a kind of descensus ad inferos – a descent into Hades and a journey to the land of ghosts somewhere beyond this world, beyond consciousness, hence an immersion in the unconscious.” Typically, in night sea journeys the hero is swallowed by a whale or sea creature, but Jung’s description suggests a form of katabasis, the Greek word for “gradual descending,” used in the ancient world to describe a descent in search of understanding, often to the underworld for the purpose of renewal and rebirth.

And so it is with Max, Sendak’s young hero, dressed in his wolf suit, complete with snarly grimace and claws, a boy in a costume soon to meet the monsters of his own imagination.

Max, and his inner monsters, can only be transformed during the night, for it is through unconscious means that the child’s anger, unappeased by logic and rational thought and impervious to parental demands, is assuaged. Sendak tells us as much through his poignant illustrations: within a couple pages Max’s day-world disappears. His bedroom sprouts a forest; shining outside Max’s window, the full moon waxes and wanes according to its own inherent laws and wisdoms. We have entered timeless space, wilderness, where nature, in its weird and lovely fecundity, reigns.

Sendak has written and spoken about how his personal history influenced his work. The monstrousness of the holocaust, the European relatives he thought of as “grotesques,” the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby as a manifestation of collective evil, all shaped the children’s tales Sendak wrote. But Sendak is also telling us something more profound about the transpersonal aspect of ego development, that wildness made conscious is energy that can be harnessed for the creative rather than the destructive.

NOW with Bill Moyers: Maurice Sendak from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

Max said, “BE STILL!” and tamed them with the magic trick of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once. And they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all and made him king of all wild things.

Joseph Campbell has called this scene, in a conversation with Bill Moyers, “one of the great moments in literature . . . because it’s only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world.”

We need not lose our human form to rage or fear. In the dark night of the soul, potentialities and possibilities exist, though a different kind of vision may be necessary to see them.

Carl_Gustav_JungIn Dream Analysis, Jung wrote: “[The] great principle of transformation [begins] through the things that are lowest . . . that hide from the light of day and from man’s enlightened thinking, hold also the secret of life, that renews itself again and again, until at last, when man understands, he may grasp the inner meaning which has been till then hidden within the very texture of the concrete happening.”

“Let the wild rumpus start!” Max shouts after being made king of all the wild things. He is announcing a joyous new order, one that celebrates the integration of solar and lunar consciousness. We have ascended with him from the underworld into a new day.

This post appeared in a slightly different form on Dale’s blog on Psychology Today. You can find all of Dale’s blog posts for Psychology Today at