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This groundbreaking volume argues that Carmen Martín Gaite and Carl Jung form an ideal combination. All the main features of the Jungian individuation process are present in the Spanish writer's fairy tales: dreams, shadow figures, wise men and women, the Self, anima and animus. Martín Gaite has been described by the critic Salustiano Martín as trying to offer human beings a different way. In this accessible new study, Anne-Marie Storrs claims that this way is found through the process of individuation - the psychological development of a unique individual - and that aspects of the process are imaginatively depicted in the three shorter fairy tales, El castillo de las tres murallas, El pastel del diablo and Caperucita en Manhattan, and in the novel so closely linked with Hans Christian Andersen's tale, La reina de las nieves.
Drawing on the work of Jungian writers to clarify and illuminate its argument, this book takes an entirely new perspective on Martín Gaite's work and, in doing so, challenges the prejudice and suspicion that too many in the humanities and beyond continue to experience when they come face to face with Jung.
List of contents
CONTENTS: A Natural Process: Individuation and the Impulse to Wholeness and Community - 'Los informes vienen de todos lados': Dreams in El castillo de las tres murallas - ¿Cómo crecer? The Process of Individuation in El pastel del diablo - El quehacer más importante: Listening as Eros in Caperucita en Manhattan - 'A lo más oscuro amanece Dios': The Dawning of the Self in La reina de las nieves - Concluding Thoughts
About the author
Anne-Marie Storrs holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh on the twentieth-century Spanish writer Carmen Martín Gaite. Her main research interests lie in the work of Martín Gaite explored from the perspective of Jungian psychology, with a particular focus on the individuation process, dreams and the symbolic life.
