Hello everyone and welcome to module seven of Finding Ourselves in Fairy Tales. We are very slowly getting there, just one more module to go after this one. I am just going to get my slides set up and then we'll begin. Okay, I'm also putting my glasses on here so I can read my notes as my printer seems to be running out of ink rather rapidly. Okay, um, module seven.
the usual copyright notice. And our theme today is issue-based narrative psychology. So here are our learning objectives and the things that we're going to be talking about for this module. We're looking at how you can establish strategies for introducing story material into your work or into your life. And we're looking at the process of selecting appropriate stories that will mirror psychological experiences that you're facing or working within your practice.
So the first question that we want to look at is how do fairy tales illuminate life's challenges? In the Fairy Tale Heroine's Journey, we've looked at our path through life and some of the challenges that we face and some of the gifts that we encounter along the way. But what happens when we have significant issues in our lives? How can fairy tales help us to understand what is happening to us at those particular times?
And it's very clear that fairy tales do tell us that women are made to be changed. We're always caught between one transformation and the next. And That happens whether or not we find the process edifying.
Often it's not. Often the challenges we face are far from edifying. And fairy tales can help us at every key transition, every stage of our lives, every challenge that we face. I would say that what we're going to do in this... in this particular module, rather than try to work through an exhaustive list of different fairy tales for different life challenges, is I'm going to offer you just an example or two for each of a handful of categories, and then we can discuss other stories and other situations in the live sessions.
So... Here is the first big challenge that many of us face or that many of our clients will be facing if we're working with them and that is sexual abuse and other kinds of parental abuse. It's very clear just from the heading alone that a fairy tale can't undo harm that's done from this kind of behavior but a fairy tale can help us understand what has happened, can help us express what has happened, can help us build imagery that might be healing around what has happened to us.
I am inevitably going to be talking here about the Handless Maiden. We've already spoken at length about this story, so I don't need to spend any time telling it to you. But the fact of the father cutting off his daughter's hands. And the fact of the mother not preventing that, for whatever reason, whether she is powerless or uncaring, we never find out.
We don't see the mother, but it happens. And that whole idea of dismemberment is such a powerful one when it comes to thinking about what such acts do to us. They literally cut off some element of our life force. So the first story that I would tend to go to in any such tale is The Handless Maiden. That act of dismemberment covers a whole wide range of issues and sins.
It doesn't have to be very specific. So I'll just park that there. Again, because we've spent so much time with that story already, you know what I'm talking about. A more obvious story, perhaps. particularly for parental abuse, particularly for sexual abuse, is the Grimm's story All Kinds of Fur.
And this comes in various shapes and sizes, as so many stories do, various versions across various different countries and various different collectors. But the Grimm's version is quite an interesting and powerful one. And if you don't know that story, let me just tell you a brief summary of it. So it's about a king who promised his dying wife that he would not remarry unless it was to a woman who was as beautiful as she was. But when he looked for a new wife, he realised that the only woman that could match his wife's beauty was her own daughter, his own daughter.
So the daughter clearly didn't want to marry her father. And she tried to make the marriage impossible by asking for three dresses. The first dress was to be as golden as the sun, the second dress was to be as silver as the moon, and the third dress was to be as dazzling as the stars.
And when he gave her all of those things, the only thing she had left was to ask for a cloak that was made of the fur of every kind of animal and bird in the kingdom, hence the story title, All Kinds of Fur. When her father provided that as well, she took the dresses and the cloak with a gold ring, a gold spindle, and a gold reel, and she ran from the castle the night before she was to be married to her father. She ran far away to another kingdom and she slept in a great forest there.
But the young king of that place and his dogs found her while he was out hunting. She asked the king to have pity on her and she received a place in the kitchen where she worked. And because she gave no name, she was called all kinds of fur because of the cloak that she was wearing.
The king of that land held a ball and she snuck out and went to it in her golden dress. The next morning, the cook... sets her to make soup for the king and she puts her golden ring in it.
The king finds the ring, questions the cook and then all kinds of fur but she reveals nothing about who she is or where the ring came from. The next ball comes around and she dresses in her silver dress. She puts the golden spindle in the soup and the king again could discover nothing about where the spindle had come from. When the third ball came around she goes in the starry dress you The king slips a golden ring on her finger without her noticing it, though, and ordered that the last dance should go on longer than usual. She was not, as a consequence, able to get away in time to change.
She could only throw her fur mantle, a cloak, over her beautiful dress before she had to cook the soup. When the king questioned her, he took hold of her hand, saw the ring on it, and when she tried to pull it away, her cloak of furs slipped, revealing the dress of stars underneath. The king pulls off the cloak, reveals her and marries her. So that's a very fine ending to a very bad beginning.
And again, stories like this, what they're going to tell us, they're not going to tell us anything specific about the nature of the abuse, thankfully. They're going to show us that it happened. And stories like this then are going to give us hope. and inspiration for a transformation of that trauma into something beautiful.
And this particular story, as they will do, offers us some very beautiful images for it. It offers us a golden dress and a silver dress and a dress made of the light of stars. And then this beautiful image of a tattered cloak made of all different kinds of fur, her disguise, what hid her from the world, just as we all hide our traumas from the world.
and then the revelation of who she actually is underneath that cloak of furs, which is something very beautiful. And again, you can see how that story can be used in a situation where we're dealing with this kind of abuse, to say that it's okay to hide, it's okay to hide what has happened, that's perfectly natural, but underneath what has happened, underneath the cloak of furs, is something beautiful still, and the time will come. when that can be revealed.
And it offers lots of opportunities to talk about the nature of that beauty, the nature of the cloak, of the concealing cloak, what it means that it's made of all kinds of furs. It's a very, very beautiful, very powerful story, even though it's dealing with a very, very difficult issue. The other story, for more generic cruelty perhaps, is another Grimm's tale, The Juniper Tree.
And again, if you don't know this one, just a brief introduction. A wealthy and very fine, pious couple, pray every day for a child. One winter, under the juniper tree in the courtyard of their house, the wife peels an apple.
She cuts her finger and drops of blood fall onto the snow. This leads her to wish for a child to be as white as snow and as red as blood. Six months later, she becomes gravely ill from eating juniper berries, and she asks her husband to bury her beneath the juniper tree if she dies. A month later, she gives birth to a baby boy as white as snow and as red as blood.
She dies of happiness, as you do in fairy tales. The husband keeps his promise and buries her beneath the juniper tree. He eventually marries again, and he and his new wife have a daughter of their own. The new wife loves the daughter but hates her stepson, as is the way of stepmothers. She abuses him every day, claiming that she wants her daughter to inherit her father's wealth instead of the stepson.
One afternoon after school, the stepmother plans to lure the stepson into an empty room containing a chest of apples. The daughter sees the chest and asks for an apple which the stepmother offers her. However, When the boy enters the room and reaches down into the chest for an apple, the stepmother slams the lid onto his neck, decapitating him. She binds his head along with the rest of his body with a bandage and props his body onto a chair outside with an apple on his lap.
It's a very strange story. The daughter is unaware of the situation. She asks her stepbrother for a bite of the apple.
She doesn't hear any response and so Her mother comes along and says, that's disgraceful. He's not answering you. Box his ears.
And she does, causing her stepbrother's head to fall onto the ground. She thinks that she has done this. While she's crying because she thinks she's killed her stepbrother, the stepmother dismembers the stepson's body and cooks him into a basically a black pudding, kind of blood pudding, for those of you who are not familiar with the term, for dinner.
She deceives her husband and she feeds him this blood sausage during his dinner. He proclaims it to be delicious. The daughter gathers the bones from the dinner and buries them beneath the juniper tree, wrapped up in a handkerchief. This is all very peculiar, but it's a very, very powerful story.
Suddenly a mist emerges from the juniper tree and a beautiful bird flies out. The bird visits the local townspeople and sings about its brutal murder at the hands of its step mother. So the bird, basically, the boy has come to life again as a bird.
Captivated by its lullaby, a goldsmith, a shoemaker and a miller offer the bird a golden chain, a pair of red shoes and a millstone in return for the bird singing its song again. The bird returns home, gives the gold chain to the husband, its father, while it gives its step sister the red shoes. Meanwhile, the stepmother complains about raging fire within her arteries, which she says is the cause of her anger and her hatred towards her stepson. I don't know whether this is supposed to be some kind of premenopausal rage or what it is supposed to be, but she goes outside for relief.
But the bird, when she goes outside, steps outside the door, the bird drops the millstone onto her head and kills her instantly. She's surrounded by smoke and flames and the sun. The bird is revealed to be the son. He emerges and reunites with his family. They celebrate, go inside for lunch and live happily ever after.
So again, this is a story with some beautiful imagery in it that can be used to think about cruelty and parental cruelty. It's specifically by a stepmother here, but again, we don't have to be very specific when we're working with and using these stories. We can...
use them to approach all kinds of different situations to which they're relevant. So that idea that the bones come back to life again, again, we're seeing transformation, just like we did in the last story. There's this idea of the cruelty, it might feel as if it's killed a part of you, but that part can still come back to life. It can be a bird, and then one day, it can be you again, whatever you feel yourself to be. So another question.
very beautiful story. So three kinds of stories, which will cover all kinds of different abuse situations, particularly in childhood, that have the lingering effects that we all know that they have. Rape, I'm sorry, this is quite a, we're dealing with challenges here and the kinds of things that clients will come to us with and the kinds of things that unfortunately, some of us may also have experienced as well.
And there's a strange... is a strange set of stories which actually are sleeping beauty type stories. Now, the sleeping beauty story that we know and that was televised, that was made into a movie by Disney, for example, and that's often told is a version of the story by Charles Perrault, a French a storyteller who liked to make things very literary and very pretty.
And of course, in that story specifically, also in the Disney version, the prince, the Sleeping Beauty, is awakened by a prince and it's all very nice. And a lot of people love that story for that reason. But there are older stories or older versions of the story which weren't quite so pretty.
There is an Italian version by Gian Battista Basile, which is called Sun, Moon and Talia, and it has a very much darker tone. His is not a story of romance between a maiden and a besotted prince, but rather of a king raping and impregnating an unconscious girl. After the birth of a great lord's daughter, Talia, wise men and astrologers cast the child's horoscope and predicted that she would be endangered by a splinter of flax. So we're not talking about pricking her finger on a spindle here.
We're talking about just some vague endangerment by a splinter of flax. To protect his daughter, the father commands that no flax should ever be brought into his house. But years later, Talia sees an old woman spinning flax on a spindle.
She asks the woman if she can have a go. But as soon as she starts to spin, a splinter of flax gets stuck under her fingernail and she collapses into a deep sleep from which she cannot be awoken. Unable to stand the thought of burying his daughter, thinking that she might be dead, Talia's father puts his daughter into one of his country houses and kind of leaves her there, as you do.
Sometime later, a king who's out hunting in the nearby woodlands follows his falcon into the house. He finds Talia there sleeping. Overcome by her beauty, he tries unsuccessfully to waken her and then, as the story says, I quote, crying aloud. He beheld her charms and felt his blood course hotly through his veins. He lifted her in his arms and carried her to a bed where he gathered the first fruits of love.
Well, that's one way of putting it, isn't it? Afterwards, he leaves her on the bed and returns to his own city. Talia, in her sleep, becomes pregnant, and after nine months, while she's still deeply asleep, she gives birth to twins, a boy and a girl.
One day, the little girl can't find her mother's breast to suckle from. So she begins to suck her finger, her mother's finger, and as she does so, she draws out the flax splinter, which is still embedded in it. When the flax splinter is taken away from her, Talia awakens.
She calls her children, Sun and Moon, hence Sun, Moon and Talia, and she lives with them in the house. The king comes back to find Talia awake, and he reveals to her that he is the father to her children. The two fall in love, even though he's raped her while she was sleeping. However, the king, unfortunately, is already married, as a king will be, and one night he calls out the names of Talia, Sun, and Moon while he's sleeping beside his wife. His wife, the queen, hears him and she forces the king's secretary to tell her everything.
Then, using a forged message, she has Talia's children brought to court. She orders the cook to kill the children and serve them up to the king. There's a theme in these last two stories, but the cook hides them instead.
She goes on to cook two lambs instead. The queen taunts the king while he eats the meal, unaware of the cook's exchange of the children for her lambs. Then the queen brings Talia to court. She demands that a huge fire should be lit in the courtyard and that Talia should be burnt on it. Talia asks the queen to allow her to take off her fine garments first, and the queen agrees.
Talia undresses and utters screams of grief with each piece of clothing she removes. The king consequently hears Talia's screams and goes to her. His wife says that's a great pity, Talia's going to be burnt. And by the way, he's unknowingly eaten his own children.
The king figures out what is going on and demands that his wife and secretary and the cook be thrown into the fire instead. But the cook explains to him how he had saved Sun and Moon, his two children, and fed the king two lambs. So anyway, the wife's dead, burnt alive. Talia and the king are free to marry, and the cook is promoted to royal chamberlain. So, another strange story.
There's also an Irish version of this called The King of Erin and the Queen of the Lonesome Island. Very similar, but a little bit more magical. So, again, these old versions of Sleeping Beauty offer us a situation in which a young woman does not consent to be impregnated, and yet is. They're complicated stories, of course, because the stories want to insist in a way that the king or the prince, whoever it happens to be, should do their duty.
That's probably not what most women are looking for in situations where that has happened. So these are stories that absolutely have to be subverted. The ending has to be manipulated, probably, if we're working with them.
And yet, it provides a situation. It provides some beautiful imagery. It provides something.
It provides a story, perhaps, to relate to. Next, domestic violence, an obvious one, blue beard, you don't need me to tell you that story. The story of a husband who has murdered his previous wives and locked them up in a bloody chamber, and the young wife who opens the chamber even though he tells her not to, and eventually outwits him and escapes.
Again, showing mostly the possibility of escape, the possibility of redemption. images again to work with the key that unlocks the door, the bloody chamber itself, and also other versions of this story like Fitch's Bird, which is another really interesting one that's worth having a look at if you're not familiar with it. It's a version of the Bluebeard's story where the young woman doesn't quite marry.
the blue beard character, she hasn't married him yet. She figures out what's going on before they actually get married and she ends up basically escaping after burning him alive, which is always very kind of satisfying when you read the story and then she doesn't get married again. She just goes home and I guess lives by herself. So fairly obvious ones for domestic violence, but something else again that we can work with. Addiction of any kind, the story that I have always worked with.
for addiction is the story of the red shoes, hence Christine Anderson's The Red Shoes. And there are lots of things that you can do with the red shoes. The red shoes can symbolize all kinds of different situations.
But I always think of them in the context of addiction because it is very much about a loss of control. You have Karen, the young girl who longs and longs and longs so much for the red shoes that she's told that she must not have and who insists on having them and who, as a consequence, dances until she finds that the red shoes that she has so longed for actually are dancing her and she cannot stop. And it is that whole loss of control thing that we see in all addictions, that inability to stop, that inability to take the shoes off.
It doesn't end well, it rarely does, and hence Christian Anderson's story, because of course... she can't still ever get the shoes off. And the only way that she is free from them is for a wood cutter to cut off her feet. But again, it offers, although in its original form, it's quite a depressing story because then she dies.
There is always the possibility of subverting them in ways that we have talked about in the last module about re-imagining fairy tales. And again, the image itself is very... powerful.
The imagery in the story to kind of explain addiction is very, very powerful and enables us to ask questions about the red shoes and what they represent, how they could be stopped without needing to cut your feet off right at the end. So again, a very useful and quite beautiful, if rather tragic, story. There are lots of stories. about bereavement, lots and lots of fairy tales, because there are so many stories in which the mother is dead. It's almost always the mother.
Sometimes the father is gone, but often it's the mother. And so really kind of almost any fairy tale will do depending on the circumstances that you're working with. But a particularly useful one is the Slavic story of Vasilisa the Beautiful, which is the story in which Baba Yaga appears.
This is the story in which she is sent to Baba Yaga's hut to fetch fire and is tested by Baba Yaga and passes the tests and returns home carrying the fire, which then burns her wicked stepmother and stepsisters alive. But at the beginning of this story, Vasilisa's mother dies, but while she is on her sickbed, she gives Vasilisa a doll. And it's a magic doll. And she tells Vasilisa always to keep the doll with her. And whenever she has need of advice to take the doll out, to give it some food, and after it's eaten, to ask, it's advice to ask a question.
And the magical doll saves Vasilisa because she helps her pass Baba Yaga's tests. And the doll really is a symbol of the mother and the mother's love and the mother's care and does for Vasilisa what a mother, a good mother would have done kind of in real life. And so again, we have this beautiful idea of the mother's blessing in the form of the doll.
walking with Vasilisa and offering her very practical advice for life. So that can be a particularly beautiful one in the context of bereavement and moving to no less compelling, but slightly gentler issues like loneliness and the idea of not fitting in. which so many children have particularly, and which so many of us still have often in adulthood. The obvious one there again is the ugly duckling, that idea that you don't fit in, you don't look like one of the other ducklings, you look like a bit of a mess, but you're the one who's going to become into a swan, who's going to turn into a swan.
Now, we don't want to make this into a story of exceptionalism, but it is really a story that can tell a child. particularly that being different doesn't always mean that you're always going to be uglier in the context of the story, that you're always going to be in some way left out, that one day your time will come in whatever form that might take. So this is really a very, very quick run through some of the stories that we can use when we're talking about specific issues and challenges that people might face. Again, we don't have time in this lecture to make it an exhaustive list, but I hope it's just given you some clues and I hope that we can use much of the time in the live sessions to talk about similar kinds of situations. What I want to do now for the rest of this lecture is to talk about the ways in which fairy tales can help us, can help illuminate different stages of life.
Now, we've already done some of this and I'm not going to repeat it. So we've already looked at the ways in which fairy tales can illuminate menopause and elderhood. So the second half of life, we looked at that in module five when we were looking at the return section of the fairy tale heroine's journey. So what I want to do really is to go back to the beginning and look at what fairy tales, how we can use fairy tales to help us navigate growing up.
And we also covered some of this in the fairy tale heroine's journey, but I really wanted to focus on, to pick up on some of those ideas and to focus on ways of working with children, because there are some very specific ways that fairy tales can help children and that we can work with stories with children. So I'm kind of going back, if you like, through some of the stuff that we have gone through in earlier modules in the context of working with adults and seeing how they apply slightly differently to children. Again, Here we can be talking about children that we might work with in therapeutic settings, or we can be talking about working with our own children, our grandchildren, any other children that happen to be in our lives and in our care. It's quite a big subject, obviously, the whole question of narrative psychology and fairy tales with children.
So again, I'm not attempting to be definitive here, but I'm just trying to give you a flavour of what's possible. And again, we can pick. any of this up in the live sessions, if you would like to do that.
Sorry, let me just go back here, because there are some things I wanted to say before I go on to the specifics. Preschool children don't have a very strong sense of plot. They don't have a very strong sense of a story in the context of plot, but they do remember, and they kind of collect and hold on to central images.
They remember... an emotionally charged image. And some of those images, of course, persist into adulthood.
I have a couple of images that I remember from being told fairy tales as a child that still stay with me. At this stage, though, children do act out and they're inspired by roles in stories. So they have an awareness of stories, even if they can't quite plot yet.
Generally speaking, from ages 6 to 12 during... kind of formal schooling, a process of more logical thought begins to develop and children begin to learn that human behavior is motivated, that it's purposeful and organized. And they begin to appreciate stories as kind of thematically organized wholes. Quite got the whole thing yet, but they're getting there.
They know what a story is and they can be very attached to the form. Power and love are often great themes. for her small children, interestingly. And as they grow older, they come to understand that characters are relatively consistent actors, that characters have a plan, that they're not just images. They don't just appear from nowhere, that they often have a plan for their lives.
And between those ages, their own kind of motivations in the world begin to take form. As they grow older... particularly as they approach their adolescent years, they begin to think about themselves and the world in more abstract terms. They begin to question their identity. They say they wonder who they are.
They also strongly identify negative identities as well as positive identities, what they don't want to be as well as what they do want to be. And they engage significantly in fantasies and daydreams and role-playing. And they also begin to ask questions about, what do I believe?
So it's in our teens for the first time that we start to construct a kind of overarching story about who we are and about what has happened to us and why. And we begin to look around us for evidence with which to construct this kind of determining narrative, the things that we do, the way that other people treat us, the quality of the relationships we have with others and so on. And so fragments in adolescence, fragments of narrative begin to bind together to form a kind of origin story, the myth that we eventually come to live by.
So there are many, many opportunities at different stages of childhood to kind of work with stories, but it's very, very important, clearly, to be aware of what is happening at that child's level of development so that we don't go too complex too soon. Stories are very much important in children's lives though and that's why it's so very easy to work with them. It's very rewarding to work with them because they're forming their identities through story. They're learning about possibilities, what is possible to be in the world.
They're learning about the consequences of different actions. So stories kind of help them make sense of what otherwise would look like chaos. Just some of the different things. that fairy tales can teach children.
These are some of the themes in fairy tales, some of the common themes in fairy tales that children are going to relate to. Many fairy tales have abandoned children in them. And so by working with those stories, by telling those stories, by talking about those stories, children can address their fears of being abandoned by their parents, of being left alone to fend for themselves.
Almost every fairy tale has some kind of conflict within a family at the beginning of it, sibling rivalries or difficulties with parents and step-parents. And it sheds a light really on the kinds of conflicts that you find within families that are not always traditional families. It enables children to think about, to work through, perhaps to accept as real and likely, if not desirable, the negative traits that parents and other members of the family might embody, as well as positive traits, because it presents them to us. We see what's happening. We see it as kind of normal because it's happening in this story and it enables children to kind of work through.
Because of the ways in which fairy tale heroines and heroes develop. It allows children to develop a kind of social maturity, to see what it looks like to become more mature and eventually to progress towards autonomy as they move away from the family and go off on their own and set off on their own journey. And of course, most fairy tales are promoting the development of courage and other traits that children will find useful in life. We should, though, when working with children, be more aware of the importance of the fact that we are not alone.
using stories, we should be very careful about obviously, too obviously promoting a moral lesson or a particular interpretation. The beauty of stories is that children can kind of intuitively discover the hidden possibilities within them for themselves. And it's better if we don't try to ram a particular theme down a child's throat.
It can often be very interesting what they see in fairy tales that we might not. And it depends very much on what's meaningful to them at a particular moment, depending on the stage of their own kind of psycho-emotional development in their life situation. So often, Just telling a story and asking the child how they feel about it can be outrageously revelatory.
Things that you did not know a child was thinking or feeling or worrying about will come out just simply by talking about a fairy tale. And that is really kind of, in a sense, one of the simplest ways of working with fairy tales with children. Now, one of the best known psychologists who has written on fairy tales and children is, of course, Bruno Bettelheim.
Bettelheim was a Freudian rather than a Jungian. I find myself disagreeing with many, many, many of his interpretations in his book, which I cannot now remember. I have a complete blank on Bruno Bettelheim's book, but you'll know the one I mean.
It's about enchantment, fairy tales and enchantment with children. um he has interpretations that are distinctly freudian there's a lot of sex in there and it's just kind of you know i've never quite got to grips with that aspect of freud's um thinking but he does have some very interesting things to say about fairy tales and what they can do for children which always makes it worth reading um the uses of enchantment isn't it and i just wanted to offer up a couple of quotes from betelheim again that tell us something about what stories are doing for children for a story Truly to hold the child's attention, he says, it must entertain him and arouse his curiosity, but to enrich his life, it must stimulate his imagination. I think we probably know that by this stage in the program. It must help him to develop his intellect and to clarify his emotions, to be attuned to his anxieties and aspirations, to give full recognition to his difficulties, while at the same time suggesting solutions to problems which perturb him.
Now, that looks like a really big recipe to follow. But really, you know, when we've looked at so many fairy tales throughout this program, I hope you'll agree that that is really what they do. A good fairy tale will do all of those things, will challenge a child in all of those ways, will impinge on the intellect, the emotions, the imagination, the anxieties, aspirations, the difficulties, and...
Certainly a suite of fairy tales will enable us to cover all of those issues with any child. Bettelheim also said, fairy tales get across to the child that a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence, but that if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end. emerges victorious.
And again, that's precisely what we have been talking about all the way through the program in the context of transformation, the whole point of a fairy tale being to begin with the archetypal impossible situation and then to work towards the ultimate transformation of that impossible situation in all kinds of ways that we might not generally think of. And finally, he says, it is characteristic of fairy tales to state an existential dilemma briefly and pointedly. This permits the child to come to grips with the problem in its most essential form, where a more complex plot would confuse matters.
In fairy tales, evil is as omnipresent as virtue, and it is this duality which poses the moral problem and requires the struggle to solve it. And again, I think we can... All agree that so many of the fairy tales that we have been talking about and working with fit very much into those categories.
Angela Carter, moving on to a more contemporary non-psychologist writer in her Virago book of fairy tales in 1990, gave us another reason why fairy tales can be really illuminating for children. She says fairy tale families are in the main dysfunctional. units in which parents and step-parents are neglectful to the point of murder and sibling rivalry to the point of murder is the norm.
A profile of the typical European fairy tale family reads like that of a family at risk in a present-day inner-city social workers casebook, which is also true. And again, that is the beauty of them because they illuminate all of the issues that a child will face. within a family.
And all families have their issues. I mean, not happily for most of us. The point of murder isn't actually the norm in real life, but nevertheless, it shows children that other people have strange families too, and that things happen which are uncomfortable sometimes and which need to be worked through, which need to be understood. So what really are we trying to achieve when we're working with fairy tales with children?
A couple of things. lots of things, but a couple of things in particular. We're trying to use them to understand what it feels like to live in the child's world. And when we're working with children, possibly more than when we're working with adults, we're constantly asking questions about what the child sees, what the child feels about a particular image, about a particular character, about a particular point in this story. We're looking for it to uncover what what it's like living in that child's world.
We're also not, we're not just revealing, we're trying to change where needed and to teach where needed. So we're trying to teach the child in a sense, in a big sense, the power to recreate its reality. We're trying to show a child that meaning and reality are created, not discovered. In other words, that it's possible to change.
the story that looks as if it's unfolding. And that's why it can also, as well as just reading children fairy tales and seeing what they think about them, that's why it can be just as important with children as it is with adults to work on reimagining them, because you're helping a child there see that what appears to be reality, what appears to be fixed, can very much be changed. So what kinds of ways of working?
can we employ with children? Choosing an appropriate story for the qualities that the child will need. From what you know of what's happening in the child's life, in the child's world, what would be a good story to elicit conversations that are going to illuminate what's going on and help the child find solutions to what's going on, perhaps?
So, like all of the things that we're talking about in this program, this does require having a knowledge of a series of fairy tales. I always recommend Grimm's and Hans Christian Andersen just because they're, you know, they're well known, they're easy to get hold of and they're so varied, particularly the Grimm's fairy tales. Often you're looking for stories of empowerment and there are lots and lots of stories of empowerment. Pretty much every fairy tale is a story of empowerment.
Hansel and Gretel is the obvious one in which they shove the Wicked Witch. who wants to eat them into her own oven. Hansel and Gretel is also a story of cooperation and community with siblings. So you just need to look at what the child needs to hear, as well as what the child is grappling with, and think about what story has elements of both of those.
We can use the original story as a prompt, stopping at choice points. So I've just been talking about kind of telling a story to a child and then talking about it. But then let's look at more active ways of working with stories. You can use the story as a prompt stopping at choice points, which means that you can begin to tell the story.
And for example, at the point at which Hansel and Gretel see the witch's cottage, the gingerbread cottage, yes, they're hungry. Is it really a good idea to eat it? to eat the witch's house without asking, without knocking on the door. And so it's about asking the child, is there any way that the story might have ended better, that it might have worked in different ways?
What could the characters have done to make it different? And here you're talking about some good consequences and some negative consequences if they had done something different because the transformation, if they didn't. if they don't do the thing that leads them into danger, the transformation that is so important might not actually occur.
So that's another way of working with a kind of pre-existing fairy tale. You can also transform or manipulate known fairy tales to relate to the child's particular situation. So what would happen if Hansel and Gretel didn't return home to their parents, but found a nice new family instead? Of course, this is going to be very suitable. for children who are in foster care or other forms of care or who are adopted.
So it's important, again, when we're working with original stories, to understand that it's okay to make these changes, it's okay to make these manipulations. Then you can look at what we would call story sequences. So what happens if familiar characters should have new adventures? So let's take Hansel and Gretel, they've returned home, they've overcome the Wicked Witch. What happens next time they go out into the forest?
What could happen again? And so they've already got a... attached to the characters. The children know something of their backstory and that makes it very, very easy to kind of make up new stories using existing fairy tale characters that they're already familiar with.
And this can be incredibly powerful. Or you can use all new stories. Again, you can just, you can have the child work with new stories of their own, such using, for example, in module six, I offered a set of...
prompts, which would enable you to kind of work through what happens to kind of extract a story from a child. And I'll come on to extracting stories in a second. But I just want to say that in whatever ways you are working with stories with children, it's particularly, I think it's important for adults too, actually, but also, but particularly for children.
to write them down in a special book, depending on the age of the child, to make it very colourful, to make it very glamorous, to write the stories down for the child if they're not yet capable of doing that for themselves, or if they are, to give them a kind of magic book, to pitch a book, a journal as a magic book, to write their own stories. And it's really important if a child is doing that, that you allow the child to keep it private, and that it's only shared when the child wants to share it. Again, whatever situation you're working in. with a child, whether it's your own child or whether it's in a therapeutic setting, that privacy is so critical to a child's development, to a child's sense of safety as well.
If they can hold their stories tight, if they're allowed to hold them tight until the time comes when they want to share them. So just a few more tips on extracting stories from children. So this is if we're looking at making up all new fairy tale type stories with children.
Often the process just of offering a story encourages a child to write one of their own. You've got to have a very creative child for that to happen, but it can happen. It can be incredibly useful to use physical prompts, toys and other objects because children are very, children certainly in their early years are very experiential. They learn by doing as much as they learn by, more than they learn by thinking and reasoning.
And the presence of an object can really illuminate possibilities for them in a way that more abstract types of thinking don't because it doesn't really come into a child's life until they get closer to adolescence. So physical prompts are great if you're trying to extract or elicit a story from a child. And often when you're telling a child an existing story, you just say simple things like, I bet the same things have happened to the people in these stories as have happened to you.
And. And then again, it's kind of almost like working with existing characters in an existing story. What might have happened to Hansel and Gretel while they were still living with their parents, for example, or what other things might have happened to them in the witch's cottage that weren't in the original story? You can use guided stories, again, just walking them through stage by stage of the story. You can make use of their heroes.
what would character X do in this situation? Let's say the child is a lover of Harry Potter. What would Harry Potter do if he were caught in the gingerbread cottage by the witch?
You can use extraneous characters and kind of insert them into the story if the story is not moving along. You can use animals and toys as characters in the story if they have pre-existing loved animals, particularly in toys. You can bring those toys into the story, make them a character in the story, and always, always use magic. Always allow there to be a magic thing that stays okay, a magic thing inside of them that stays okay no matter what, and get them to work on the imagery of that.
What is it that they carry? If the child is in a story, what is it that the child carries that always stays okay no matter what? What does it look like?
What object is it that? in itself, as with adults, can be incredibly revelatory, but there should always be something in that story that helps them feel safe, like Vasilisa's doll that was given to her by her mother. Always allow them a safe. object. So guiding questions, again, that you can use to help elicit stories from children.
Talk always about these elements of a story, a good character, a bad character, because children like the simplicity of that, a character who helps, a specific time, a specific place, and a magical object. All of these elements of stories are very easy, even for the youngest children, to imagine. to work with. So ask them, who are the characters?
Who's the good character in this story? Who is the bad guy? What does that look like?
And then it's a question of asking questions like, why are these characters the way they are? What happened to them to make them the way they are? The obvious question that you ask time and time again when you're eliciting a story from a child is, and then what happened? Why do the characters do what they do?
What would have happened if they'd done something else? Again, questioning different ways of seeing a story, different ways of seeing the characters in the stories, different ways of moving a story on. What we're really talking about here, if we go back to our early narrative psychology pieces in the first couple of modules, is we're looking at, again, externalizing problems.
And how can we have conversations with children that help to externalize their problem and help them to see it as something that can be transformed, changed. The process of telling stories itself externalizes the problem because the problem becomes a person or an object with which the child can have a relationship. You've told it, it's kind of out there, it's in the space between you and the child.
The child can try out new aspects. of his or herself by taking on a particular role in a story and exploring the world in that role. What might happen to a child like this in a story? You can talk to the child about how, what's happening to them in the story.
We're going to call that for the sake of brevity, the problem. How does that affect others? How does that affect others in the story? And you can make the characters in the story very similar to their parents or their friends or their siblings or whoever is involved in the child's particular issues.
You can invite the child to use similarly externalized resources against the problem. So you can talk about using courage against fear. You can talk about courage as a kind of tiger inside. You can talk about the child becoming a fear buster.
You can explore how the child feels about all of that. You can ask the child things like, how would a fear buster act? You know, if it wasn't you in this story, but you had another story that there was a fear buster in, what do you expect a fear buster to act like? And then how can that be applied back to the child's issues and problems? You can ask things like, what would fear's reaction to a fear buster be?
A fear buster clearly would bust a fear. How? Why? What would that feel like?
What would that look like? Would that be a good thing to do or would that be a bad thing to do in different situations? You can give the problem the names of characters in the story.
But again, we always come down to never interpreting for the child, always asking questions to clarify meaning and leading the child, perhaps in certain directions, but always allowing the child to make his or her own decisions about the way the story goes. Staying with the child's imagery particularly. And that is the essence of everything that I want to say about working with children, using stories just as it is the essence of everything that I hope I've said about working with fairy tales in adults.
Image is everything. You should always pay attention to the child's imagery that arises naturally. from their worldview and always make it central.
And again, as I said at the beginning, preschool children even collect these central images that have great emotional power, even if it doesn't necessarily make sense to adults. Even if they don't remember the plot of a story, they will remember this emotionally charged image. It's likely to persist and so into adulthood very often and so... It's really important to do everything that you can to allow that image to develop and to grow and to work with it and to cast the powerful images in ways that are positive rather than just negative. And that really probably is as much detail as we have time to go into on working with children in this course.
Again, I just wanted to give you a flavour and I hope that you've seen that in working with children around fairy tales, we're picking up on exactly the things that we have been talking about throughout this programme when we've mostly been talking about adults, but it's just a question of understanding. the possibilities that children have at their particular stages of development and understanding that for them, the ability to bring in existing heroes and heroines, the ability to use their toys as characters, because you know perfectly well that children are always making up stories about their toys and putting their toys in imaginary scenes. It's about harnessing. these natural behaviours that children have, and kind of importing them into the story world, so that they can make the story very much more vivid, very much more real, very much more a part of their lives, as opposed to something that's just kind of external to them that doesn't really impact them. So that really is the key there.
Again, in the um live discussions we can talk about any or all aspects of this we can talk about different fairy tales for different life challenges and we can talk about working with younger people at the early stages of their lives um and the sorts of stories that we might that we might find helpful in the meantime this is the question that i'd encourage you all to think about in your forum discussions, and it's kind of a little bit backward looking, doing it kind of reverse. In reverse, if you take a favourite fairy tale, any fairy tale at all, just one that you love, and spend some time reflecting on the particular life issues and challenges or life stages that it might illuminate. So rather than going looking for a story that tells you something about addiction, I'd be just thinking, I love the story of the red shoes. What can that tell me about a life issue or a life stage? I hope that makes sense.
And then again, as always, we can talk about them at length in the live sessions. And then in the final module next month, we will be looking at different ways of working with fairy tales. We have focused in very strongly so far on the actual narrative, the details of the narrative, the elements of the narrative, the stories themselves. What else can we do?
other ways of working will we have? That's what we will be talking about next time when we bring this program to a close. So thank you as always for your attention and I look forward to the conversations to come.