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This small, attractively produced book belongs to a special edition, ‘Psychologisch Gesehen’ (‘Viewed psychologically’). It is presumably produced for any cultured and interested reader and not exclusively for Dr Dieckmann's analytical colleagues. With its long and eclectic bibliography it tends to appeal to the latter, while, with its dedication to the author's own four children, it is clearly an amateur's book in the sense of a labour of love and learning.
The book falls into two sections, each devoted to the analysis of a fairytale, interlaced at different points with dreams of patients, to illustrate an archetypal theme or a psychodynamic complexity which amplifies the analysis of the tale. Not the other way round.
The first is the Tale of the Fisherman who found the Bottle, and the second is the Tale of the Porter and the Tree Ladies.
There is a basic assumption underlying this composite weave of scholarship inspired by C. G. Jung and of psychodynamic theorizing and exposition. It is this: a fairytale presents the outline of a solution of a collective phantasy which underlies a fundamental human problem. These tales have a beauty and an inner logic in their progression, wholly convincing because universal validity can confidently be expected. There is no attempt made to treat one dream series of one and the same patient as parallel to the respective tale, but, as mentioned above, this is a book by an analyst written from his vast experience and reading for a non-professional public.
Since Dr Dieckmann carries his scholarship lightly and since he also happens to write beautiful German, I enjoyed every page of the book, and I hope it will soon be available in a worthy English translation so that our readers will be able to draw from it their own pearls of wisdom, each according to need and capacity.
This book tells you what a particular therapist aims to do and why. It does not tell you how. Tantalizing but understandable.