Books and Journals

(Compiled by Jean Rhees)

[Authors are asked to send off-prints of articles in learned journals on subjects relevant to this section. Offprints of articles in books or other publications will not be reported on here since they constitute part of a volume that can be made the subject-matter of a review.]

DIECKMANN, H. (Berlin): ‘Das Lieblingsmärchen der Kindheit als therapeutisher Faktor in der Analyse’ (‘The favourite fairy-tale of childhood as a therapeutic factor in analysis’),  Prax. Kinderpsychol,  17,  8 (1968).

In this paper Dieckmann continues with his favourite theme, the importance of the favourite fairy-tale in relation to symptomatology, personality structure and analysis. The present study concerns 50 long analyses during which it was possible to discover one or more fairy-tales which were significant to the patient and could be worked through. Dieckmann draws the conclusion that the ego can become fixated in a ‘pattern of behaviour’ which corresponds in a detailed way to what is found in a fairy-tale.

He gives three shortened case histories, taking for each of his illustrations an identification of the patient with a fairy-tale figure which constellates the patient's fate or ‘neurotic arrangement’. In particular he gives two examples which ‘can only [italics mine] be explained with the aid of the theory of synchronicity’. The first is that of a 39-year-old woman for whom the over-anxious mother was like a witch who isolated her, whereas she felt herself drawn towards her father who was more in touch with reality. As in the fairy-tale (Rapunzel) the father died when the patient was 12 years old, yet the fairy-tale had been significant to the patient when she was only between six and eight years old.

The second case refers also to a female patient, and in her case Anderson's ‘The Red Shoes’ was the favourite fairy-tale when she was nine or 10 years old. The parallel event was at a later age (12). She was handed over to an aunt who, l