RECENTLY I FOUND MYSELF taking my little nieces to the store to do some shopping. At five and seven they are quite canny shoppers - they know they can't have everything (their Mom trained them well) and yet they know they have some negotiating power. So if they are to have one toy each, just one, they weigh the possibilities pretty closely as to how much they can get without seeming greedy. For they have already got a sense of the long-term results of careful negotiation. They know that a toy has to be in the reasonable price range (whatever that means) or the number of times they get to do this will be fewer. So - how to get what one wants becomes delightfully complex, and I was fascinated to see how they thought. After all, this kind of assessing of a situation is fairly sophisticated, and a point of growth as they try out their interpersonal skills.

The only disappointment was that the toys they were heading towards were not nearly as interesting as the children were. Predominantly pink, frilly items in plastic boxes of the same garish colors, and with a dominant theme of horses and/or unicorns, there were also some rather disappointing figures that I can only describe as princesses, with big, doe eyes.

The message sent by the doe-eyed princess dolls was that all one had to do was wear pink and have big melting eyes, and suddenly one was beautiful and indeed powerful. The natural intelligence of my two nieces was directed to an ultimate end, and an ultimate role model, that had nothing to do with intelligence.

Well, you may say, they're only kids, so who cares? But it set me thinking about those ancient fairy tales of the frog prince. Disney took that idea and had the little princess squeamish about kissing the frog who had rescued her golden ball from the well. When she does kiss him he becomes a handsome prince, and all ends happily. Unfortunately this is about as saccharine and sanitized as the story could possibly be.

So let's look at the original tale, as collected by the Grimm brothers. There are several version, all roughly the same, and in them the princess is indeed playing with her golden toy, usually a ball, and it rolls into the well. She can't get it back and a frog tells her he can get it for her, if she agrees to let him eat at her dish, sit at her table, and sleep in her bed. She agrees, the frog retrieves the bauble, and she runs off with it.

Now, ingratitude is a terrible thing. But then the frog comes along and demands to have the promise honored; the king hears of it and he decrees that promises must be respected. The princess is not amused. In fact she does everything she can to avoid her end of the bargain. The frog insists, but it isn't until he asserts his right to sleep in her bed that she rebels. She picks up the frog and hurls him against the wall! Disney edited that one out. And that's when he turns into a prince.

Now this is clearly a very different story. And it demands to be seen mythically. Obviously talking frogs are not the stuff of everyday reality, so of course we are invited to see this as a symbolic tale, right from the start. The frog, in symbolic terms, is a creature that is an emblem of transformation. It lives on the earth and also under water; it grows from a small jelly into a tadpole and then becomes an air breathing frog. In ancient times the frog was a symbol of the transformative power that all led creatures from infancy to sexual maturity. It is a figure that appears in the most ancient of wall paintings in such places at the archaeological sites at Catal Huyuk, specifically as a reference to regeneration. So that frog, when he appears in the story, dates back about 10,000 years and he signals sex, and the steps leading to sexual maturity.

The little princess is, as she plays with her golden ball, a self-involved innocent creature. She has no need for boys. All she needs is her bauble. But at a certain point we all lose our innocence of outlook, as she looses her ball, and we want to get it back. Girls know they're getting some power because they know all about charming daddy, but that doesn't mean they want sex with anyone, at least not just yet - and anyway boys are icky! But once that golden ball has rolled down the well, the deep well with the water of life in it, they know something has changed. They may want to think it hasn't, but it has. And so the princess wants to ignore the fact that she's changing, she wants to ignore the frog's insistence. The king, notice, won't play that game. He insists on reality. Promises must be honored, but at a deeper level, the maturational process must be honored too, no matter how much a daughter may want to remain as daddy's little girl. Daddy in this case refuses to accept the pouting and the flouncing of the princess.

And this is where the princess becomes interesting. She doesn't want the frog near her food, but she has to allow him to eat from her dish; she doesn't want him near her at all, but she has to put him in her bed. And under all this pressure she rebels. She throws the frog against the wall to kill him. And that's anger - good, healthy anger. For what she is signaling is that she knows something male has to be in her bed one day, but not this one!

When she's ready to accept the idea of sex what once was a repulsive thought can be seen differently, but it takes a real effort from her. She has to say she deserves better than a frog, even if her father says so. She finds her power, and the prince knows that she's worth loving, because she has a mind of her own and isn't afraid to show her opinions directly. She stands up for herself! When she does that it allows him to transform, too.

Because, you see, all the great fairy tales are equal opportunity tales. The male frog gets to be transformed too. Think of the frog as behaving like a real creep. He's the sort of person who hangs around girls, trying to make them feel indebted to him, somehow, in the hope he can then leverage that into a bedroom visit. That sort of social coercion winds up leading many young women into circumstances they regret later. And, actually, it has more to do with the male's sense of not being worthy than anything else. By getting angry the princess signals she wants no such person in her life, and that's a truly important lesson for both of them.

This is a very different story from the one we all think we know. It reaches deeper, as deep as that well of feeling the little princess knows exists but doesn't want to acknowledge just yet.

In archetypal terms we can see the princess as an Innocent, who, when the king insists on her keeping her promise, feels like she is a misunderstood Orphan. Daddy isn't the great protector any more; he can't really be my Daddy! This disappointment sends her into a place of confusion, and as we know it is the Pilgrim archetype who takes on confusions, trying to work out what they might mean. But it's when she reaches her breaking point that she declares herself. She speaks out, as Warrior archetype, and as she declares what she won't accept she opens the doors to what she will accept, and so she balances herself as a Warrior who is also a Lover. She's a kid with some spirit. She's worth loving, and knows it.

And that's what the frog needs to see so he can become human. After his long Pilgrimage he's ready to be a Warrior-Lover too. Yet no one can achieve this if they love someone who can't or won't grow. The Warrior-Lover has to be able to fight for what he or she loves, and no one can love someone else fully if that person isn't worth fighting for. Similarly, if the Princess had just passively placed the frog in her bed she'd have been failing to love herself, and so she'd have been the sort of low self-esteem person who ultimately cannot inspire real love in a partner. People grow through the archetypes, and grow spiritually, because they are spurred forward by others. It's a complex story, the Frog Prince, told in a way that is so compressed and delicate we can easily miss what it's saying, and has been saying for centuries.

And so I watch my nieces and wonder if, with these commercial plastic toys before them now, they'll ever grow to become people who will be able to ask for the partners they truly want, or if in later years they'll feel they have to go around kissing frogs on the off chance one might turn out to be something special.

So here's the point. If you kiss a frog it won't change. If you accept a less than impressive partner he or she may not ever improve. It's when we start demanding quality that we get quality. People smarten up when we demand more from them as people, and stop seeing them just as convenient objects to do our bidding. The doe-eyed figures in pink don't know that message, and they aren't delivering it either.

Perhaps these girls could use a good book of fairy stories, after all?

© Dr. Allan Hunter, 2009

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Allan Hunter was educated at St John’s College Oxford and is presently a professor of Literature at Curry College, Milton, Massachusetts, and a therapist. His two books on archetypes are Stories We Need to Know and The Six Archetypes of Love, both from Findhorn Press.

Visit www.allanhunter.net or www.sixarchetypes.com to find out more.