The Princess and The Pea

The Princess and the Pea is a Hans Christian Andersen tale. There is a parallel myth found in Grimm’s called “The Pea Test.” In both tales, there is a test designed to ferret out if the princess that appears in the kingdom is a “true” or “genuine” princess. It is her “sensitivity” and “delicacy” that will prove her true:

The old queen upon the arrival of princess, “went into the bed-chamber, took all the bedding off, and put a pea on the flooring of the bedstead; then she took twenty mattresses and laid them upon the pea, and then twenty eider-down beds upon the mattress. On this the princess had to lie all night. In the morning she was asked how she had slept.

‘Oh miserably!’ said the princess. ‘I scarcely closed my eyes all night long. Goodness knows what was in my bed. I lay upon something hard, so that I am black and blue all over! It is quite dreadful.’

Now they saw that she was a real princess; for through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eider down beds she had felt the pea. No one but a real princess could be so delicate.”

If we take the kingdom as a metaphor for our psychological landscape, what is needed in this kingdom? What is the delicate princess that is being sought? And why an image of delicacy that is so exaggerated, i.e. that the princess would turn “black and blue” because of a pea underneath so many mattresses and down beds?

The particular psyche represented by this kingdom is one missing delicacy or sensitivity. The word delicate is defined as “keenly sensitive as to feeling,” or “pleasing to the senses in a subtle way.” Sensitive as “a capacity of the organism or sense organ to respond to stimulation, irritability; the degree to which a radio receiving set responds to incoming waves, the capacity to be easily hurt…”

What is missing is responsiveness to stimuli including feelings, both one’s own and other’s feelings. The sensitive princess is perhaps the antidote to Rapunzel in the tower who is locked up in a sort of schizoid encapsulation. With this sensitive princess, you have entering the psychological landscape a princess who can respond to stimulation.

This particular princess however, is not only sensitive, she is hyper-sensitive. Her hyper-sensitivity is compensatory. To have this kind of sensitivity in reality might not me very desirable but what the image is doing is exaggerating to bring into focus the missing element in the kingdom, i.e. its compensating for an inability to be responsive to either inner or outer stimuli and feelings.

This particular psyche is someone who has difficulty registering their own reactions, they are not reactive enough to know when something either stimulates them or irritates them. Perhaps they sleep-enticed by that wonderful eider bedding, and don’t notice those little irritants that are full of meaning.