Seven Dwarves as psychological aspects.
For the sake of convenience I’m going to ignore a great deal of what is in Snow White but if you are interested the piece is filled to the brim with great material to work with. Really I just wanted to give an example of the type of work that can be done with pop culture tropes. I actually think I bit off more than I could chew due to this stories much longer history as a folk tale.
I’m going to look at the primary characters of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as a psychological model.
The Seven Dwarfs are components of a human bioregulating nervous system and brain. Happy is the positive emotions, Grumpy the negative, Sleepy is the sleep-wake and other cycles, Sneezy is the body’s health monitor, Bashful is the social emotions, Dopey is prelinguistic playfulness and, finally, Doc is the directing intelligence. The person represented by this is unique, someone else might have had a Mopey instead of a Grumpy and a Flirty instead of a Bashful.
And while this person is able to feed, clothe, and make it to and from work, a look at their cottage/mind tells you they don’t have it all together.
Then Snow White enters the scene. Snow White is Royalty, comes from the castle and can communicate to the animals. Put simply she is the Soul or in Jungian terms the Anima.
At first the Dwarfs are resistant to this new influence on their lives but before long they are cleaned up and ship shape, and generally working together better then ever before. She gives them a reason for being, a purpose.
More later when I talk about the Queen and the Prince… and at least one way to work with this for self-change.
