Rapunzel’s tower experience begins when she is 12 years old. That is the age at which the sorceress decides to place the girl in the tower with “neither doors nor stairs.” Because of her age at the time of her imprisonment, this fairy tale is often interpreted as a delay in the individuation-separation process, a putting off of adulthood and the growing biological impulse of sexuality.
Rapunzel’s tower experience can also be a sort of encapsulation. I began writing about this yesterday. What does this mean? It can mean one of two things. I have known individuals in whom social contact is painful, in whom venturing out of the solitude of themselves to make contact with others elicits great anxiety. Its not that they don’t desire contact, only the anxiety keeps them away from relationship. Interestingly, I find that these people are often quite sensitive and warm in a psychotherapeutic relationship.
The other meaning of encapsulation, Rapunzel’s tower experience, is about the difficulty we have as individuals of being whole, and the locking away of parts of ourselves. In our present culture, the most notable part of ourselves that is imprisoned in a tower is the feeling life. Our feeling life, like Rapunzel, can be placed in the tower by a wicked queen, or in this case, by a sorceress. This is essentially the same as saying that some of us are taught that feelings aren’t very important, and one must be governed by logic, rationality, etc. Freeing Rapunzel would thus come to mean the freeing of some part of ourselves that has been locked up because at some point in our lives she was deemed unacceptable.
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