Fairy Tales and the Social Unconscious

'Fairy tales move here magically between the concrete and the abstract, the somatic and spiritual. The reader is fascinated by the play with human existence, from intimacy to primordial experiences, and the emergence of unconscious relations in society. This book is an eye-opener to the meanings and functions of metaphors and the symbolic world of fairy tales.'- Robi Friedman, PhD, clinical psychologist and group analyst, President of the International Group Analytic Society'In this richly textured text, Ravit Raufman and Haim Weinberg integrate fable, myth, fairytale and group psychotherapy, deepening the reader's understanding of the social unconscious and its historic, cross cultural and collective roots. Language is the essential medium of our work and this text expands our therapeutic capacity to understand in depth our patients' language and use of metaphor.'- Molyn Leszcz, MD, psychiatrist-in-chief, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto, and professor and clinical vice chair in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto'Once upon a time, Ravit Raufman and Haim Weinberg, two Israeli writers, went looking for the source of fairy tales. They journey on borderlines between the somatic and symbolic, go past Bettelheim's "Uses of Enchantment", through the world of living fossils to somatic idioms, and beyond language via nonverbal experience they enter the realm of the imaginary. Here they make new discoveries about differences between Jung's collective and Foulkes's social unconscious, as Freud's and Bollas's shadows are cast on the objects. Their scholarship, enchantment and originality break new ground and the authors' discoveries will provide landmarks in many fields.'- John Schlapobersky, training analyst, Institute of Group Analysis, London, and author of From the Couch to the Circle: Group-Analytic Psychotherapy in Practice