 Beauty and the Beast. Girls in our society share in the masculine hero myths because, like boys, they must also develop a reliable ego identity and acquire an education. But there is an older layer of the mind that seems to come to the surface in their feelings with the aim of making them into women, not into imitation men. When this ancient content of the psyche begins to make its appearance, the modern young woman may repress it because it threatens to cut her off from the emancipated equality of friendship and opportunity to compete with men that have become her modern privileges. This repression may be so successful that for a time she will maintain an identification with the masculine intellectual goals she learned at school or college. Even when she marries she will preserve some illusion of freedom despite her ostensible act of submission to the archetype of marriage, with its implicit injunction to become a mother. And so there may occur, as we very frequently see today, that conflict which in the end forces the woman to rediscover her buried womanhood in a painful but ultimately rewarding manner. I saw an example of this in a young married woman who did not yet have any children but who intended to have one or two eventually because it would be expected of her. Meanwhile, her sexual response was unsatisfactory. This worried her and her husband, though they were unable to offer any explanation for it. She had graduated with honors from a good women's college and enjoyed a life of intellectual companionship with her husband and other men. Although this side of her life went well enough much of the time, she had occasional outbursts of temper and talked in an aggressive fashion that alienated men and gave her an intolerable feeling of dissatisfaction with herself. She had a dream at this time that seemed so important, she sought professional advice to understand it. She dreamed she was in a line of young women like herself, and as she looked ahead to where they were going, she saw that as each came to the head of the line she was decapitated by a guillotine. Without any fear, the dreamer remained in the line, presumably quite willing to submit to the same treatment when her turn came. I explained to her that this meant she was ready to give up the habit of living in her head. She must learn to free her body to discover its natural sexual response and the fulfillment of its biological role in motherhood. The dream expressed this as the need to make a drastic change. She had to sacrifice the masculine hero role. As one might expect, this educated woman had no difficulty in accepting this interpretation at an intellectual level, and she set about trying to change herself into a more submissive kind of woman. She did then improve her love life and became the mother of two very satisfactory children. As she grew to know herself better, she began to see that for a man, or the masculine trained mind in women, life is something that has to be taken by storm as an act of the heroic will, but for a woman to feel right about herself, life is best realized by a process of awakening. A universal myth expressing this kind of awakening is found in the fairy tale of beauty and the beast. The best known version of this story relates how beauty, the youngest of four daughters, becomes her father's favorite because of her unselfish goodness. When she asks her father only for a white rose instead of the more costly presents demanded by the others, she is aware only of her inner sincerity of feeling. She does not know that she is about to endanger her father's life and her ideal relation with him, for he steals the white rose from the enchanted garden of beast, who is stirred to anger by the theft, and requires him to return in three months for his punishment, presumably death. In allowing the father this reprieve to go home with his gift, beast behaves out of character, especially when he also offers to send him a trunk full of gold when he gets home. As Beauty's father comments, the beast seems cruel and kind at the same time. Beauty insists upon taking her father's punishment and returns after three months to the enchanted castle. There she is given a beautiful room where she has no worries and nothing to fear except the occasional visits of beast, who repeatedly comes to ask her if she will someday marry him. She always refuses. Then seeing in a magic mirror a picture of her father lying ill, she begs beast to allow her to return to comfort him, promising to return in a week. Beast tells her that he will die if she deserts him, but she may go for a week. At home her radiant presence brings joy to her father and envy to her sisters, who plot to detain her longer than her promised stay. At length she dreams that beast is dying of despair, so realizing she has overstayed her time, she returns to resuscitate him. Quite forgetting the dying beast's ugliness, Beauty ministers to him. He tells her that he was unable to live without her and that he will die happy now that she has returned. But Beauty realizes that she cannot live without beast, that she has fallen in love with him. She tells him so and promises to be his wife if only he will not die. At this the castle is filled with a blaze of light and the sound of music, and the beast disappears. In his place stands a handsome prince who tells Beauty that he had been enchanted by a witch and turned into the beast. The spell was ordained to last until a beautiful girl should love beast for his goodness alone. In this story, if we unravel the symbolism, we are likely to see that Beauty is any young girl or woman who has entered into an emotional bond with her father, no less binding because of its spiritual nature. Her goodness is symbolized by her request for a white rose. But in a significant twist of meaning, her unconscious intention puts her father and then herself in the power of a principle that expresses not goodness alone, but cruelty and kindness combined. It is as if she wished to be rescued from a love holding her to an exclusively virtuous and unreal attitude. By learning to love beast, she awakens to the power of human love concealed in its animal and therefore imperfect, but genuinely erotic form. Presumably, this represents an awakening of her true function of relatedness, enabling her to accept the erotic component of her original wish, which had to be repressed because of a fear of incest. To leave her father, she had, as it were, to accept the incest fear, to allow herself to live in its presence in fantasy until she could get to know the animal man and discover her own true response to it as a woman. In this way, she redeems herself and her image of the masculine from the forces of repression, bringing to consciousness her capacity to trust her love as something that combines spirit and nature in the best sense of the words. A dream of an emancipated woman patient of mine represented this need to remove the incest fear, a very real fear in this patient's thoughts because of her father's over-close attachment to her following his wife's death. The dream showed her being chased by a furious bull. She fled at first, but realized it was no use. She fell and the bull was upon her. She knew her only hope was to sing to the bull, and when she did, though in a quavering voice, the bull calmed down and began licking her hand with its tongue. The interpretation showed that she could now learn to relate to men in a more confidently feminine way, not only sexually, but erotically in the wider sense of relatedness on the level of her conscious identity. But in the cases of older women, the beast theme may not indicate the need to find the answer to a personal fixation or to release a sexual inhibition or any of the things that the psychoanalytically minded rationalist may see in the myth. It can be, in fact, the expression of a certain kind of woman's initiation, which may be just as meaningful as the onset of the menopause as at the height of adolescence, and it may appear at any age when the union of spirit and nature has been disturbed. A woman of menopausal age reported the following dream. I am with several anonymous women whom I don't seem to know. We go downstairs in a strange house and are confronted suddenly by some grotesque ape men with evil faces dressed in fur, with gray and black rings, with tails, horrible and leering. We are completely in their power, but suddenly I feel the only way we can save ourselves is not to panic and run or fight, but to treat these creatures with humanity as if to make them aware of their better side. So one of the ape men comes up to me and I greet him like a dancing partner and begin to dance with him. Later I have been given supernatural healing powers and there is a man who is at death's door. I have a kind of quill or perhaps a bird's beak through which I blow air into his nostrils and he begins to breathe again. During the years of her marriage and the raising of her children, this woman had been obliged to neglect her creative gift, with which she had once made a small but genuine reputation as a writer. At the time of her dream she had been trying to force herself back to work again, at the same time criticizing herself unmercifully for not being a better wife, friend and mother. The dream showed her problem in the light of other women who might be going through a similar transition, descending, as the dream puts it, into the lower regions of a strange house from a too highly conscious level. This we can guess to be the entrance to some meaningful aspect of the collective unconscious, with its challenge to accept the masculine principle as animal man, that same heroic clown-like trickster figure we met at the beginning of the primitive hero cycles. For her to relate to this ape man and humanize him by bringing out what is good in him, meant that she would first have to accept some unpredictable element of her natural creative spirit. With this she could cut across the conventional bonds of her life and learn to write in a new way more appropriate for her in the second part of life. That this impulse is related to the creative masculine principle is shown in the second scene where she resuscitates a man by blowing air through a kind of birds beak into his nose. This pneumatic procedure suggests the need for a revival of the spirit rather than the principle of erotic warmth. It is a symbolism known all over the world. The ritual act brings the creative breath of life to any new achievement. The dream of another woman emphasizes the nature aspect of beauty and the beast. Something flies or is thrown in through the window like a large insect with whirling spiral legs, yellow and black. It then becomes a queer animal, striped yellow and black like a tiger with bare-like almost human paws and a pointed wolf-like face. It may run loose and harm children. It is Sunday afternoon and I see a little girl all dressed in white on her way to Sunday school. I must get the police to help. But then I see the creature has become part woman, part animal. It fawns upon me, wants to be loved. I feel it's a fairytale situation or a dream and only kindness can transform it. I try to embrace it warmly but I can't go through with it. I push it away. But I have the feeling I must keep it near and get used to it and maybe someday I'll be able to kiss it. Here we have a different situation from the previous one. This woman had been too intensively carried away by the masculine creative function within herself which had become a compulsive, mental, that is airborne preoccupation. Thus she has been prevented from discharging her feminine, wifely function in a natural way. In association to this dream she said, when my husband comes home my creative side goes underground and I become the over-organized housewife. Her dream takes this unexpected turn of transforming her spirit gone bad into the woman she must accept and cultivate in herself. In this way she can harmonize her creative intellectual interests with the instincts that enable her to relate warmly to others. This involves a new acceptance of the dual principle of life in nature of that which is cruel but kind or, as we might say in her case, ruthlessly adventurous but at the same time humbly and creatively domestic. These opposites obviously cannot be reconciled except on a highly sophisticated psychological level of awareness and would of course be harmful to that innocent child in her Sunday school dress. The interpretation one could place on this woman's dream is that she needed to overcome some excessively naive image of herself. She had to be willing to embrace the full polarity of her feelings. Just as beauty had to give up the innocence of trusting in a father who could not give her the pure white rose of his feeling without awakening the beneficent fury of the beast.