Psychoanalysis of Hans Christian Andersen’s Tales

Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark, the son of a poor shoemaker and a washerwoman. As a young teenager, he became well known in Odense as a reciter of drama and as a singer, but when at the age of fourteen, Andersen set off to acquire fame in Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen, he failed miserably. However, while in Copenhagen, young Andersen was able to make some influential friends who would get him into school to remedy for his lack of proper education. In Copenhagen, he gained access to two families – the Collins and the Wulffs. There he came to know both the bourgeois upper class of the capital and the very lowest stratum of its proletariat. He came to know the fight for survival and the bitterness of being a dependent on the good will of others. It is at this time that Andersen experiences the suffering and humiliation that followed from leaving one world without having quiet been accepted by a higher one, which is an experience shared by many characters in his tales. Andersen was a very intelligent, ambitious writer with a love of high society and a tortured soul

In 1820, Andersen’s first book was published and after that books came out at regular intervals. At first, he considered his adult books more important than his fantasies. In later life, however he began to see that through his tales, the apparently trivial stories could vividly portray constant features of human life and character, in a charming manner. As a consequence, Hans Christian Andersen began to write more original stories, rather than retelling traditional tales. A volume containing his first four tales ( The Tinder Box, the Princess and the Pea, Little Claus and Big Claus, and Little Ida’s Flowers) was published in May 1835, followed up by a volume of three more tales the following December. Andersen returned to the stories he had heard as a child, but gradually he started to create his own tales. In 1837, Andersen began writing the fairy tales that won him international fame and access to the royal houses and cultural elites of Europe. While his novels were traditional romantic works celebrating religion and nature and a deep faith in God and Christianity, his fairy tales offered more room for his subconscious mind and for a projection of issues that haunted Andersen during his lifetime. During these stories, Andersen would often thinly disguise people he liked or disliked as characters in his stories such as in “The Little Mermaid, and “The Snow Queen” and “Little Ida’s Flower”.

Sexuality – “Little Ida’s Flowers”

Andersen’s sexual orientation is a matter of great controversy in academic circles. Many of his stories are interpreted as references to his sexual grief. Among these stories is “The Nightingale”, a tribute to Jenny Lind, a famous opera singer with whom Andersen was in love. In another, “The Little Mermaid” sacrifices her own life for that of her unattainable prince and some biographers believe that this story is connected to Andersen’s love for Edward Collin to whom he wrote: “I languish for you as a pretty Calabrian wench…my sentiments for you are those of a woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain a mystery.” Collin on the other hand, may have been the love of Andersen’s life but refused to play the part of his romantic soul mate. Likewise, the infatuations of the author for the Danish cancer Herald Scharff and Carl Alexander, the young duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, did not result in love affairs. It is believed that during his lifetime, Andersen expressed deep feelings for both men and women but that each time it resulted in unrequited love and deep emotions that would influence his stories. Sexual frustration was one of the main pervasive motifs for writing some of the most recognizable of his stories. Many biographers believe that Andersen may have never had sexual relations with anyone. The pages of his diaries are decked with crosses which he used to indicate masturbation. His hidden obsessions, often of a homoerotic nature, drove Anderson to create some of the most extraordinary characters and develop them to embody the disturbance and dissatisfaction of Andersen’s own life.

When presenting psychoanalysis of Christian Andersen’s tales where sexuality is a fundamental component of the underlying theme of the tale, it is crucial that one closely analyzes one of Andersen’s most sexually occupied stories, “Little Ida’s Flowers”. “Little Ida’s Flowers” is read as a story about a little girl’s sexual fantasies and overnight discovery of real sexuality, in which the student functions as the teacher, the one who knows all about flowers and butterflies; the clerk as the forbidden conscience; the dance of the flowers as the king and the queen as the final excitement. In “Little Ida’s Flower”, Andersen presents a dream within a tale that is filled with sexual content but what is most interesting is that his comments indicate a tone of disapproval. The more sexually dangerous the dream content becomes, the greater the defense mechanism and disapproval sets in. The dream is moved to a deeper layer of the unconscious in that it expresses Andersen’s sexually fraught, surreal metaphors and his struggle with his own sexuality. The death of the flowers represents the fading of sexual excitement while the promise of even more beautiful flowering next summer indicates the certainly of sexuality as a recurrent fact of life.

Religious Implications - “The Little Mermaid”

While verbally transmitted fairy tales express universal human traditions and issues, the literary fairy tale, permits a psychodynamic understanding of the writer. In “The Little Mermaid”, Anderson portrays the willingness to undergo the pain and mutilation involved in the loss of both the mermaid’s tail and her voice in order to become a mortal and marry a prince. This has been regarded as illustrating problems in female sexual development as well as Andersen’s homosexual conflicts that support Freud’s concept of the role of castration anxiety in the negative Oedipus complex. Freud considered the successful resolution of the Oedipus complex to be key to the development of gender roles in identity. He posited that boys then resolved this conflict with castration anxiety and believed that the unsuccessful resolution of the Oedipus complex could result in neurosis, pedophilia and homosexuality. Andersen’s unresolved sexual issues may have been the cause behind the storyline of “The Little Mermaid” however, a great deal of analysis is found on the religious implications in “The Little Mermaid” and its foundation as a moralizing and didactic tale concerning sexuality and development. Andersen’s religious feelings, which provide an undertone to all that he wrote, stem from an unidiomatic sort of Christianity, a religion of the heart and the emotions bound to human nature and to the natural world around us as a start point for the yearning for God. In “The Little Mermaid”, Salvation from the power of evil is defined as the alchemical power of love as the power to turn evil into good, to bring epiphany where there has been suffering. Though love that can defeat death in “The Little Mermaid”, a duality is yet observed where both sides of love are encountered: the erotic one that cannot purge death into life and the pure love that is capable of self-sacrifice and which manifests itself when the mermaid is rewarded by transcending death itself into a promise of an immortal soul among the daughters of the air. This archetype embodies the epiphany for the victory of good over evil. Thus it is only essentialized love, which ahs transcended the erotic level of the senses and has purged of the selfishness that can work miracles, assimilated with Christian love.

Duality – “The Snow Queen”

Nietzsche once argued that, for the sake of life, origin and aim had to be kept apart. Andersen never desired to separate the two. Hans Christian Andersen was a product of two social environments. His social rise provides the direct and indirect motif in many of his tales, novels and plays, both as a productive source in his search for a new and more comprehensive identity and as a source of perpetual and unresolved issues. Even more decisive were the disturbing social experiences from the lowest ranks of society and his own urge to cast off the trammels of poverty, break with his social inheritance and realize his potential in the only outlet the times provided, the world of art, an urge that became ever more dominant throughout his childhood. Andersen also stands between two worlds: the popular old oral narrative tradition and the modern world with its culture of books and focus on the role of the author. Thus it is only natural that Andersen’s stories contain a duality element, an alchemy of values which functions dialectically, implying both black and white magic, good versus evil, beautiful versus ugly.
Andersen’s genre of fairy tales is so unique in part due to his ability to seldom assume the legitimacy of fairy tale logic, motivation relying rather on realistic assumptions. An excellent example is exposed in “The Snow Queen” which many have considered Andersen’s attach on cold, harsh reason. In contrast, this tale, among the most distinctive tales written, presents a duality within its context that embodies Andersen’s style of writing. Though the ending of this tale is happy, it is apparent that the heroes have undergone a change that is more complex than the initiation of fairy tale heroes: at he end of “The Snow Queen”, Kai and Gerda have become adults and, though they are still “children at heart”, they have learned about the existence of evil in the world and, worse than that, about the evil that can exist within themselves. Andersen takes the degree of realism as a criterion for classification, while at the same time asserting the intrusion, to a greater or lesser extent of the supernatural dimension in all of them. The positive and negative poles of these oppositions are difficult to determine since the slight touch of a fantastic that is rather of a psychological nature is very powerful. The dual function is performed by means of questioning and revitalizing oppositions between values, which not only challenges the simplicity of the fairy tale pattern but also enriches by passing judgment on the social world of Andersen’s time.

The main pairs of opposite of values such as good versus evil, beautiful versus ugly, true versus false are characteristic of fairy tales in general but the difference comes when these values are analyzed in their deep structure. The good / evil opposition for example is approached in such a complex sense that it goes beyond the common moral sense. The valence of the good / evil opposition is increased with their internalization as coordinates of the identity quest characterizing the evolution of the heroes. In “The Snow Queen” this quest materializes in the evolution from childhood to maturity, which involves getting the awareness of evil in the world and within oneself. When becoming aware of his own shadow, in Jungian terms, (which in fairy tales is perceived as the difference between natural and supernatural); one also discovers the existence of the evil in one’s own soul. C.G. Jung believes that “Heaven and Hell are destinies of the soul”, thus suggesting that the human soul is the site of good / evil opposition. It is there that one also encounters the shadow, which according to Jung is the first step to self knowledge.
Reflection and representation is essential along the identity quest, being visible in the various roles that the characters of Andersen’s tales play which have a development throughout the tale. In “Snow Queen”, the story which is about identity formation, Kai is alternatively himself and his shadow, the absorption of the latter by the former finally marking his coming to the grownup stage. Temptation and perversion of the self is also portrayed in “The Snow Queen” by the wizard’s distorting mirror which breaking into fragments, invades the whole world with small particles of evil that distort the perception of the world. Thus, Gerda’s journey in search of Kai is actually a quest for reunifying the fragments of the mirror and also for correction the distorted perception of the world. It is also a quest in the name of love, against coldness and lifelessness. The mirror also makes the connection between the duality of beautiful / ugly. Andersen, going against the traditional fairy tale where there is a one to one correspondence between beauty and good, on the other hand emphasizes the ethical dimension, opting for a beauty of the inner nature, coming from the spirit.

Hans Christian Andersen’s stories linger in the imagination partly because they defy the world of comfort with which parents, teachers and children’s books attempt to block out the terrors of isolation, abandonment and extinction. The presence of pain in human experiences, sexuality and adult issues pervade Andersen’s writings. Anderson wrote about the relationship between the individual and the external world, natural about the individual’s relationship to the social world, about the response to the gaps and conflicts that arise between what is desired and what is allowed. Andersen shows how dark and light, sorrow and joy, pain and pleaser cannot be separated but in fact possesses a duality that is crucial to human development. These themes have evolved and have allowed generations of psychoanalyst to offer theories of the conscious and unconscious.