Watch an animated short of The Little Match-Girl:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ig26YFmgdc
I want to give a broad outline of this fairy tale’s psychological meaning. It depicts a particular psychological state of being, or in the language of Carl Jung, a complex. When one is in this experience, one feels very young—our heroine here is a young girl. The experience is one of feeling young, alone, cold and hungry. When this particular psychological state of being is constellated, we feel the interior coldness of disconnection from ourselves and others. We also experience the hunger of wanting to be fed, a metaphor perhaps of how we feel nourished when we have significant human contact and empty without it.
The story involves how the little girl goes about handling her psychological experience of cold and hunger, in other words her feelings of being loveless and devoid of human warmth. When one is “in a complex” one handles the feeling aspect of the complex in particular ways. How one handles the feeling, or the behavior itself, characterizes the complex. For some people, feeling devoid of human contact and warmth might manifest in a state of denial—“I don’t need anyone”—for example. The Match-Girl handles her feeling state by engaging in fantasy.
The Little Match-Girl strikes the matches and each time she does so, a fantasy image emerges. The matches themselves are metaphors for our libido, or in other words, how we expend our energy. We all have a limited amount of energy/libido and we make choices as to how we use it. Our libido is directed in particular directions. The little Match-Girl uses hers fantasizing about those things that she hopes to experience in her life, ultimately fantasizing about embracing the “only person who had loved her,” her now deceased grandmother.
She uses all of her matches (all of her energy) at this point to maintain the fantasy of her grandmother’s embrace and in the end, makes a wish that her grandmother take her with her when the matches burn out. The grandmother “took the little girl in her arms, and both flew in brightness and joy above the earth, very, very high, and up there was neither cold, nor hunger, nor care—they were with God!”
The story ends as we are told that the Little Match-Girl is found “frozen to death on the last evening of the Old Year. The New Year’s sun rose upon the little corpse!” We are told that the people who found her believed “She wanted to warm herself…” and that “no one imagined what a beautiful thing she had seen.”
As the readers of this story we are privy to the two perspectives, we know what the Little Match-Girl imagined, but was also know that she was not ultimately warmed (objectively) by the fantasy of her grandmother’s embrace, and that she died “frozen to death.”
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2 comments:
The Great Mother (Grand) is yearned for in our time. We cannot gain her through nostalgia, I think. This story has a fine feeling tone because it reminds us of the absence of this enveloping safety and comfort. Perhaps if we were lucky we tasted it with the biological mother, but in any case it is lost at some point. The young one in us is vulnerable, lonely, almost unseen by the business and busy-ness of outer life. Her poverty is not seen.
The words sole and soul are related. In the Christian tradition God enters through the foot of the cathedral, the south portal. Where we touch reality, the point of impact, has no protection in this story. --JR
The sense of "being unseen" that you expressed as the Little Match-Girl's experience is part of this particular complex. When the Little Match-Girl complex is constellated, we feel unseen. I am reminded of the work of Donald Winnicott who writes of the subjective experience of "indwelling" or sense of embodiment one gets when they have had a "good enough mother" that provides a good enough holding environment. My sense of the Little Match-Girl is that the positive mothering experience of containment and holding is missing.
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