has not been grasped nor exhausted. Psychological analysis by the use of Freud's methods and results was the first to accomplish this. This is successful, for the fairy tales are inventions of the directly utilized, immediately conceived experiences of the primitive human soul and the general human tendency to wishfulfillment, which we find again in modern fiction only somewhat more complicated and garbed in different forms. Thus we come to examine and interpret fairy tales and myths not only along astronomical and abstract lines but primarily in accordance with their deeper psychological trends.
Anyhow I arrived at the pleasing and important conclusion, that for my work, it was not necessary for the investigation of fairy tales, in a psychological sense, to know their historical pedigree first. In fact this is often impossible. I found in the introduction to "Sammlung Neuisländischer Volksmärchen" by Frau Dr. Rittershaus[1] the following, for me, not a philologist, consoling conclusion: that the Icelandic fairy tales are found step by step in agreement with the German folk tales; that they, in part at least, are common Germanic property, but that, especially, the theory that all European fairy tales sprang from India is incorrect. Many facts establish, how a whole mass of fairy tales, especially in Iceland, are indigenous, autocthonous, that in certain ones a later immigration is demonstrable; that the great majority of fairy tales have probably arisen at different places and at different, indeterminable times; that it is impossible, to locate the home of the folk tales, as little as it has been possible to trace them all back to one hazy Aryan myth.
And Stoll ("Suggestion und Hypnotismus in der Völkerpsychologie," II. Auflage, Leipzig, 1904) shows in different places, how suggestive and autohypnotic actions, procedures and views of the same sort occur among peoples who are not closely related one with one another either geographically or historically or through descent. Only the psychic foundation is everywhere the same.
Finally my work itself proves to me that the human psyche produces at all times and in all places suggestive and hypnotic phenomena, produces universally, just as general, for example, a symbolism, which is chiefly constructed from the unconscious and
- ↑ Halle a. S., Max Niemeyer, 1902.
