1. tiny writing
2. diminutive form of symbolic language, whether visual, auditory, or tactile, or archetypal

Faerie tales and myths relate wisdom of the ages manifested as archetypes. These stories can be analysed from various perspectives. The interest here is to approach the story from an archetypal vantage. In my opinion, the biggest problem in interpreting these stories is the analyst fails to distance himself from the archetype and projects his situation upon the story. This in and of itself is not bad per se, but an analysis of this type loses universal generality for specificity. While helpful for the analyst metaphorically, it is no longer applicable to the world-at-large.

One method one can employ to mitigate this specificity is to regard Jung's manifold Types. Whereas a Thinking person will interpret a story differently than a Feeling person (or Introverted v. Extroverted, Sensing v. Intuitive, Perceiving v. Judging), if this is taken into account during the interpretation phase, the interpretation will embody both aspects.

In my opinion Marie-Louise Von Franz did this best. For an excellent vantage of the Freudian position on faerie tales, Bruno Bettelheim offers The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales.

The importance is not the interpretation of the story, rather it is the story in and of itself. Much like interpreting a dream where the dream itself is much more important than the conscious interpretation of the dream, so it goes with faerie tales. The interpretation is secondary, however it is still valuable.

More to come...