The Little Mermaid - Femme Fatale

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Fairy tales … What role do they play in our life? Each of us in childhood, listening, reading or peering into a fairy tale, felt a spiritual response or an explosion of feelings for some hero and his story. So we unconsciously felt the scenario of life living in us, which we then unconsciously embody. This script is stored in our unconscious, waits in the wings and then controls our actions, choices and destiny from there. Of course, our parents, generic scripts and circumstances of our life also play an important role in shaping our destiny. But experience shows that the unconscious picks up the influence of these figures and weaves them into an archetypal plot (the plot of a fairy tale), from which it broadcasts a movie called Our Life.

Today I would like to consider the fairy tale "The Little Mermaid" by Hans Christian Andersen, but we will begin our analysis with a plot that appeared in myths and legends long before the appearance of the fairy tale. Consider the Archetype of the Little Mermaid as a femme fatale that has haunted men for a long time. And let's start the story with a description, exploring one after another heroines who were the ancestors of the very cute Disney Mermaid.

The ancient Greeks warned of sirens - women with fish tails, wonderful beauty and a charming voice, who lured sailors off the coast of Sicily and ate them.

The European mermaid, represented in the undine literature, is a creature with a fish tail, but without a soul. Seduces men, because if she gives birth to a child from an earthly person, she will be able to find an immortal soul.

Lorelei is a maiden enchantress, the heroine of German folk legends. Not just a sorceress, a mermaid indifferently destroying people, but an unhappy woman burdened by her fatal magic. Lorelei captivates everyone who approaches her, but she does not need these "victories", because her beloved has left her.

And, finally, in Slavic mythology, mermaids lived in rivers, swamps and people avoided meeting with them, as they "will destroy, lure and drag to the bottom." However, according to one version, drowned virgins became mermaids, who were sacrificed by the pagan Slavs in order to appease the habitable place near the reservoir.

We can assume that anger and aggression towards men had a well-founded nature, it was revenge and hatred for betrayal, violence and desecration of the female nature. And this story goes away in those ancient times when matriarchy was overthrown, and in the patriarchal system, there was no place for freely thinking and acting women, and even more so for those in power. There is no description of men of mermaids, and we can make the assumption that mermaids, like the Amazons, existed separately from the male world, and their meetings were associated with oppression and trampling on the feminine principle.

Now let's get back to our realities. We are a people who have survived several wars. Have women of our kind faced male violence? What place in the patriarchal world does female sexuality take and the right to decide for itself how to build her life. The phrases that have ever been heard by us: "you will bring it in the hem", "very smart", "it is your own fault", "the dog will not jump up if the bitch does not want", has not accumulated along our ancestral lines enough negative our ancestors, and in ourselves, the negativity towards the male gender.

One of the most difficult grievances that women find hard to forgive is the betrayal of a husband or beloved. When you work through this moment in therapy, it is as if you hear the voice of all the female ancestors of the client, in her feelings and words. And when the moment of "safe place" for these feelings comes out, the relationship in a couple goes to a new level of its development.

In my practice, I have seen several manifestations of the dark side of the Little Mermaid archetype.

Married women, limited in the realization of their sexual fantasies with their husbands, seduce and fall in love with other men. Relationships do not develop into sexual ones (the little mermaid has a tail instead of legs), she enjoys other people's feelings, while feeling her unfulfillment.

Women who survived the betrayal and betrayal of their husbands and inflamed with hatred of their ex-husband and his new chosen one. After a while, they fall into a love triangle, where they are already tempting women, and the man brings her his feelings and suffering, since for some reason he cannot leave the family. And there is in this sad story for her, on the one hand, a kind of rapture from the suffering of this man.

Key point: a woman does not pursue wealth or the protection of a man. She needs his feelings, and he is ready to give them in ecstasy.

Sooner or later, a woman feels the limitations of this scenario, and she has to do something with this dissatisfaction.

We examined the Little Mermaid Archetype from the side of its fatal part for men, and perhaps this explains the tragedy of the story of the little mermaid described by Andersen. But more on that next time …