Bollingen Workshop: Human Dilemmas and the Everyday Truths of Folk Tales

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According to the renowned Jungian analyst and scholar, Marie Louise von Franz, “since fairy tales through the world disclose certain common themes and structures, we may assume that they spring from the most universal substrate of the human psyche.”  It is for this reason that fairy and folk tales portray frequent human dilemmas, the situations that give rise to them, and paths toward their resolution.  Faced as we are at this time in our lives with serious personal, cultural and global conflicts, the everyday truths of fairy tales can offer us much needed wisdom and guidance.  In this weekend program we will rely upon some of these tales to focus our attention on the archetypal or universal patterns, symbols and energies that are emerging today.  Our hope is that this access to the symbolic meaning of folk tales will enable us to participate in a more conscious and responsible way in our personal and cultural lives.  Hopefully, it will also illustrate the usefulness of a symbolic, psychodynamic view of these tales for psychotherapeutic work.

 In our Saturday workshop we will discuss a western tale that again shows us a typical mundane problem and how a heroine finds her way to survival and homecoming after her journey through a magical realm. In effect, we will be probing the often subtle challenges that present themselves to us in initially unseen ways.   There will be time for discussion and exploration of the symbols and development in this tale, with special focus on where we see these same patterns in our current everyday lives.

Mara-Lea Rosenbarger is a Jungian Analyst, with the Diploma from The C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. She has a private practice in Bloomington, IN and conducts on-going reading groups studying the works of Jung and Marie Louise von Franz as well as other writers, including modern novels. She has spent many years working in the public schools as an elementary teacher, a Reading Specialist, and as an Instructional and Literacy Coach. She is currently an Adjunct Faculty member at Indiana University in The School of Education. She is particularly interested in modern and not so modern fiction and how these writers revive and re-enliven the universal patterns that are so efficiently and elementally expressed in folk tales, making this great body of
human experience accessible to so many of us in so many ways.