How to find answers when your problems feel unsolvable
Feel stuck in life? This strange story can set you free.
You can listen to this post on TikTok, YouTube or Instagram.
***
It's going to sound absolutely bizarre, but the story I'm about to tell you holds the key for those who feel stuck, paralysed by inner conflict or like they've hit rock bottom and don't know how to climb back up.
Ferdinand the Faithful and Ferdinand the Unfaithful
This healing story starts with the birth of a boy called Ferdinand the Faithful. Ferdinand grows up poor but good, and while on an adventure through the wild paths beyond the borders of his home town, he meets… another Ferdinand – Ferdinand the Unfaithful. This guy is bad news. Capable of all sorts of wickedness, Ferdinand the Unfaithful is the darkness to Ferdinand the Faithful's virtuous light.
Both Ferdinands wind up serving the King. Now, something you need to know about this King is that he's not doing great. He's lost his woman, and also his nose, and he’s generally moping around feeling sorry for himself. Bad Ferdinand welcomes this as an opportunity. He wants to get rid of Ferdinand the Faithful once and for all (because all his kindness and generosity just pose too much of a threat), so he goes to the King and suggests that Good Ferdie should be sent on a quest through extremely perilous waters in order to rescue the King's bride and return her to the castle. And, just in case, he also puts forward that should Good Ferdie fail, his head will be cut off. It's a little harsh but this King is really quite suggestible so he agrees and that's the deal.
Good Ferdie, though, is our hero, so, with the help of a magical white horse, and against all odds, he does bring home the bride. The problem, then, is it turns out she's not actually all that into the King, and who can blame her? This guy couldn't be bothered to rescue her himself, he seems really quite weak and influenceable, not to mention the fact that he's lost his nose and doesn't seem to care.
Now, the princess did not like the king because he had no nose, but she liked Ferdinand, and once when all the men were at court she said she could work magic – she could cut someone’s head off and put it on again. Since nobody wanted to be the first, Ferdinand the Unfaithful eggs on Ferdinand the Faithful. The princess cut his head off and put it on again, and only a red thread was to be seen. The king asked where she had learned to do that. “Oh,” said the princess, “I know how to do it; shall I try to cut your head off?” “Oh, yes!" he said. So she cut his head off but didn’t put it back on again!
– Marie-Louise von Franz's, "Shadow and Evil in Fairytales"
So the Princess takes matters into her own hands, beheads the old King, promising that she will replace his head afterwards and bring him back to life, but doesn't, and thus vacates the throne for a new and better leader.
Finally, the magical horse suggests that Ferdinand should get on his back and gallop around the field three times, after which the horse stands on his hind legs and is transformed into a prince.
THE END
IF you're still with me, well done and thank you for trusting me. There is a point to all this, I promise.
How do fairy tales come about?
In her book "Shadow and Evil in Fairytales," Marie-Louise von Franz says that fairy tales, more than myth or religious stories, allow us to peek directly into the shadowy contents of the unconscious mind. This is because, rather than having been curated, prettified or just bent into a certain shape to fit an agenda, fairy tales are old stories that probably started out true, but then, as they were passed from storyteller to storyteller and village to village, they warped into these weird and wonderful versions of themselves. Over time, the specific details of the original tale faded away completely, so that in the end only the archetypal content – that is, the symbols that had fundamental, unshakable meaning for us as people – remained.
So, if the Two Ferdinands fairy tale sounded like a kind of lost-and-found-closet version of a story, that's because it is. Each of those weird elements has universal symbolic meaning that speaks to your unconscious mind and my unconscious mind and everyone else's, too, even if, consciously, it all sounds like a load of nonsense.
With that said, let me very briefly break down key symbols in this tale – which, by the way, will also give you a new perspective on countless films, fairy tales and other stories, so you can (hopefully!) grab the healing meaning with both hands and put it to use in your own life.
The King archetype
First up: the King. Jungian psychology tells us that the King archetype represents the dominant consciousness. The status quo. Psychologically, this means that the King represents our current perspective and version of self.
So why on Earth is he missing his nose? Well, the sense of smell is archetypally linked to intuition, which we can still see in common phrases like "I smell a rat" and "just follow your nose." So the noseless King, then, is disconnected from his instincts and intuition. He represents that state we all find ourselves in from time to time when we're out of touch, or lost, going along with things but not really feeling in control, which is dangerous because it leaves us vulnerable.
This is precisely why the King is so malleable to Bad Ferdinand's evil suggestions — and also why he gets beheaded at the end of the story, which is a deeply archetypal motif present in countless myths and fairy tales that represents the vital, natural cycle of death and rebirth of the personality. Every moment of growth in our lives involves the death of one version of self in order for the next, evolved version to be born.
The Twin Ferdinands/Selves
Linked to the above theme, we have the two different Ferdinands — the faithful/good vs. unfaithful/evil – who represent two conflicting versions of self. I shortened the tale just now, for obvious reasons. In the real thing, their conflict goes on for a long time, each of them alternating in winning the King's favour. The big question, of course, is: who will win? Will the slightly naïve good version of self who's trying to find its feet be allowed to fully develop? Or will the regressive, destructive shadow self finally dominate?
Herein lies the nub of the story. This fairy tale depicts inner conflict, and the question of how to reconcile two apparently irreconcilable parts of the personality. Again, we all know what this is like in real life.
We may know it, for example, as the battle between a burgeoning part of the self that longs to live a clean and healthy life versus the part that just loves to binge on booze or cigarettes or junk food, or whatever.
Or perhaps you'll recognise it as the part that wishes to turn over a new leaf, ditch our slovenly ways and knuckle down to study or work hard versus the part that urges us to slob out in front of Netflix and slack off on the tasks we set ourselves.
So, in these situations, which one wins?
If you call to mind an example of that kind of blocked scenario from your own life, you'll know that the answer is that neither of them win. Not really. It might feel like the "evil" part wins, because we're so focused on the "good" part, and we see it being sabotaged repeatedly. But the shadow part doesn't get its way, either. Not fully. Instead, we just ping pong back and forth between the two extremes feeling increasingly untethered… or noseless.
That is, of course, until the Bride/Princess makes an appearance.
The Bride/Princess archetype
As representative of the "feminine principle," which is able to give birth to novelty and change, the Bride/Princess archetype here initiates the creative solution.
One of the reasons this fairy tale feels so weird is that it has such an abrupt, unexpected ending. We follow good Ferdinand's development, absorbed in the ongoing conflict, rooting for his victory over evil and then, all of a sudden, this lady shows up and fixes everything by beheading the noseless king, whom we weren't even really thinking about. He was like a side character, but he ends up being the solution because, once his head is off and the princess decides not to replace it, everything looks different.
In one fell swoop, a new order has been ushered in: the old, weak and suggestible King is dead, which means there's no one for Ferdinand the Unfaithful to manipulate. His power is taken away, and the conflict comes to an end.
The princess, then, represents an all-important change of perspective. She is the embodiment of an unexpected, creative solution as a result of seeing the world through new eyes.
How do we find our own Princesses?
There is a lost princess for every single problem, every internal conflict. So how do we find her?
The first thing to remember is that she is out there, and we're not going to get anywhere if we just carry on with the fruitless battle between good and bad.
But here's the less than excellent news: there's no way to fast-track or skip the conflicted, suffering part of all this and jump straight to the new order because the creative solution bubbles up out of the unconscious as a result of our experience of the struggle.
As Jung describes in Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, intellect and self-reflection alone can’t bring us face-to-face with the archetype of Meaning. This archetype, which hides behind the chaos of the Anima (that's our Princess), can only be experienced after reaching some kind of crisis point – where all seems lost, all crutches have been decimated, etc.
In other words, in order to reach its resolution, the ego conflict must be completely lived through. And while this might sound like a bad thing, it's not, really, because it means that if you're suffering, if you feel lost, broken and hopeless, as we all are sometimes, then you are exactly where you need to be. Pain, frustration and that horrible sense of stuckness are not evidence of our failure in life – as so often feels to be the case while they're in progress – but rather an essential part of the process of change. Those feelings are the agony of psychological labour; they're what we go through in order to birth a new self, a new perspective… A new life.
So, no, you're doomed or broken. You're in the process of renewal. You just need to keep your eyes open for the story or the piece of advice or the unexpected moment that makes everything look different.
Thank you for reading!
We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.
We must live through it with awareness.