This paper continues the author's thesis of the importance to children and to adults of fairy tales. (See also review in this Journal, Jan., 1967.) In them they find aspects of their inner natures with which they themselves sense they must come to terms. Here Dieckmann takes up the brutal details so often found in folklore, and points out that to read these as expressions of aggression or of masochism is to see only part of their meaning. The deeper one is nearer to analogous brutalities found in some initiation rites where maturation and development are closely linked with the experience of fear and pain, and where the brutality carries a symbolic meaning of sacrifice and change. He illustrates with a detailed account of the course of the analysis of a young woman.