From the author: Olifirovich, N.I., G.I. Maleychuk, G.I. Reparation and self-healing: from symbiosis to separation // Journal of practical psychology and psychoanalysis. Quarterly scientific and practical journal of electronic publications. – 2009 – No. 2. [Electronic resource]. – Access mode: Reparation and self-healing: from symbiosis to separation Natalya Ivanovna Olifirovich, Gennady Ivanovich Maleychuk In order to come to an agreement with the Forbidden and the Impossible, each time a process of mourning is needed, and one that would compensate for what was abandoned. N. McDougall Early development of the SelfWho are we? Why are we the way we are? Can we change? Every person asks himself these questions sooner or later. The talented psychoanalyst N. McDougall compares our Self to an internal theater in which various characters act, often unknown to each other, sometimes at war with each other. Their actualization can cause us bewilderment, anger, fear, and somatic manifestations. These “characters” are fossilized casts of our own Self, relating to events of the past. Repetitive actions, actual conflicts are based on scripts that “were written years ago by the naive child self, struggling for survival in the adult world... These psychic plays can be performed in the theater of our soul or body, can be played out in the outside world, sometimes capturing the souls and bodies of others people, and even public institutions, as a stage” (McDougall, 2002, p. 4). The oldest, most archaic layers of our psyche are based on events that occur in the first years of life. This is an axiom adhered to by supporters of the psychodynamic direction of psychotherapy. The classic works of D. Winnicott on the impact of relationships with the mother on the development of the infant, the studies of J. Bowlby on the influence of the early environment on the formation of neurosis and neurotic character, the works of M. Klein and A. Freud on the analysis of the development of children in the first years of life show that failures in resolving early conflicts between love and hate have far-reaching consequences for the well-being of the child. It is significant others, family or substitute social environment that create the environment that either supports the development of various structural elements of the self, or traumatizes the fragile child’s psyche. In this article, our attention was focused on the problem associated with early development in conditions of a deficit of love and empathy. Thus, usually the mother takes care of the baby, the relationship with whom is the basis for the child’s subsequent understanding of himself, his feelings and desires. Analyzing the life stories of clients, we are often faced with either deprivation or the inability of parents to meet the needs of the child. Here we are not talking about satisfying biological needs, which are most often provided by the environment, but about needs associated with contact, intimacy, and establishing relationships. The young child is “less focused on receiving mother's milk than on the perception of self-care and feelings of warmth and affection” (Max-Williams, 1998, p. 50). We placed the focus of our analysis on the fairy tale by G.Kh. Andersen's "The Little Mermaid". A number of animated and feature films have been created based on this fairy tale. This sad story leaves neither the reader nor the viewer indifferent. “The Little Mermaid” is a vivid illustration of the thesis that a person tries to make up for the deficit that arises in early relationships with significant people throughout his entire subsequent life. The most serious cases of personality pathology arise due to violations of the mother-child relationship in the early stages of development. According to the hypothesis of M. Mahler, “the roots of childhood psychoses, as well as borderline disorders, should be sought in the second half of the first year of life and in the second year of life in the autistic, symbiotic phases and in the phaseseparation-individuation" (Mahler, McDevitt, 2005, p. 1). In the normal autistic phase, which lasts from birth until about one month of age, the newborn operates on an instinctive level. The mother’s task is to be the “external executive self of the child”, to help him achieve homeostasis through predominantly physiological mechanisms. The emergence in the child of the ability to perceive that satisfaction and pleasant experiences depend on some source outside the bodily self indicates a transition from autistic to symbiotic phase. The normal symbiotic phase describes the state of fusion between the child and the mother, when “I” and “not-I” are not yet distinguishable. The symbiotic phase lasts approximately from one and a half to 5-6 months. This term characterizes that stage of a child’s life when the differentiation of his own self from his mother is just beginning to be revealed. During this phase, the child develops the ability to form an emotional attachment to the mother, which is the basis for all his future relationships. The normal passage of the symbiotic phase is a precondition for the separation of the child from the mother in the subsequent separation-individuation phase, as well as for the further development of identity. Separation, according to M. Mahler, is a process during which the infant gradually forms an intrapsychic representation of himself that is different from the representation of his mother. Individuation means the infant's attempts to build his own unique identity, to become aware of his own individual characteristics. During this period of development, adequate emotional openness of the mother and affective contact with the child, which for the latter is a condition for the development of all mental structures, becomes especially important. Problems arising at this stage of development lead to the formation of a borderline personality organization (McWilliams, 1998, 78). The central problem of borderline individuals is the problem of identity, associated with difficulties in feeling and describing their own Self. Early problems of differentiation, finding their Self can lead to various kinds of psychopathologies during adulthood: dependent and codependent behavior, depression, psychosomatic disorders. Within clinical descriptions we are dealing with an oral, symbiotic or narcissistic character (Johnson, 2001). Thus, in the early phases of development, it is extremely important what main objects the child interacted with, how he experienced contacts with them, how they were internalized into internal images and representations. Relationship disturbances at these stages of development are defined as dyadic, or preverbal. According to the concept of M. Balint, these disorders are of a deficiency nature and lead to the so-called basic defect (Balint, 2002). Metaphorically, this defect can be compared to a plot of land on which a house is subsequently built. Even if the building of our identity in later stages of development is built from good and durable material, what was earlier and deeper - swampy soil under the structure, an underground river, quicksand - regularly leads to its subsidence and destruction. The difficulties of accurately establishing the period of “failure” in the relationship between mother and child lead to the creation of various theoretical models that are tested in real psychotherapeutic work. However, there are ready-made, almost archetypal stories that make it possible to analyze the connection between the nature of adult disorders and pathology in early child-parent relationships. It is they who often make one think about the decisive significance of disorders in the mother-child dyad and family dysfunctions in general for understanding the formation of personality. Early losses To analyze the fairy tale “The Little Mermaid”, you first need to pay attention to the family in which the main character grew up. This family can be described as incomplete (there is no mother in the nuclear family) and at the same time extended, since representatives of three generations live together: the father, his six daughtersand his mother. The male character, the sea king, “was widowed a long time ago.” At the same time, despite his status, he never married again, and “his old mother ran the household.” The term “old woman” refers to the idea of ​​​​the impossibility of performing certain female functions, primarily maternal ones. And indeed, she, on the one hand, is a smart woman, but, on the other, “very proud of her family: she carried a whole dozen oysters on her tail, while nobles had the right to carry only six. In general, she was a person worthy of all praise, primarily because she loved her little granddaughters very much.” However, despite her advantages, the grandmother does not notice the obvious: her youngest granddaughter, the Little Mermaid, is a strange child: too quiet, too thoughtful, too different from the other sisters. When analyzing the early object relationships of the Little Mermaid, it can be assumed that the death of the mother occurred shortly after her birth. Apparently we are dealing with an oral character (Johnson, 2001). Based on the history of the development of the Little Mermaid and her current characterology, we can assume that she successfully passed the autistic and symbiotic phase of development and was able to satisfy the need for security and primary attachment. Obviously, she had the belief that “the world is not dangerous. I have a right to exist." As for the oral character, it is formed under the condition that the child was fundamentally desired, while the needs for emotional attachment could not be satisfied properly, in our case, due to the loss of the main object of attachment - the mother. It was the deficit of empathy, understanding of the girl’s feelings, desires and experiences in early childhood that led to the formation of a certain type of personality. Her needs for intimacy, tactile contact, and care, necessary for development, were not adequately satisfied. She had to demonstrate independent behavior while remaining in a state of chronic need for close relationships, support and love. As follows from the text, the Little Mermaid is non-contact, she prefers to listen to the stories of her grandmother and sisters, while she herself spends time in dreams and fantasies: “The Little Mermaid loved most of all listening to stories about people living above, on earth. The old grandmother had to tell her everything she knew about ships and cities, about people and animals.” Initiation as a crisis The world of the Little Mermaid is a world of waiting for a miracle. Stories about life above stimulated her imagination, and, having never seen this world, the Little Mermaid already knows that she will very much fall in love with that world and the people who live there. This world is one of the aspects of the Forbidden. You can enter there only after you turn 15 years old. The little mermaid sisters, one after another, go upstairs and talk about the miracles they saw. The little mermaid can only wait for the very day to come when she will receive the right to leave the palace and swim on the surface of the sea. Obtaining this right symbolizes the onset of a new stage of life, and the rise to the top is an initiation procedure. Initiation (from the Latin initiation - dedication) in a broad sense - any ritual actions that are accompanied and formally consolidate changes in the social status and social role of a person or group of people in connection with joining any corporate association or elevation to any social position. The initiation that the Little Mermaid has to experience can be classified as a rite of passage (Efimkina, 2006). These rituals are associated with the movement of an individual or group of people into a new social category and the acquisition of a new social status. Any initiation takes place on two levels – external and internal. The external level manifests itself in the form of various sequential ritual actions, which may vary depending on the type, purpose of initiation, cultural traditions, etc. In our fairy tale, initiation makes it possible to rise to the surface of the sea. “When you turn fifteen years old,” said my grandmother, “you will also be allowed to float onsurface of the sea, sit in the moonlight on the rocks and look at the huge ships sailing past, at the forests and cities!” The rise evokes associations with growth, maturation, and the transition to a qualitatively new level of perception of the world. On the “girl - girl - woman - old woman” scale, this transition defines the boundary between childhood and adolescence/adolescence. The internal level of initiation is characterized by the emergence of experiences of the initiate in connection with his participation in initiation and his acquisition of a new status and a new identity. In this sense, initiation can be considered as a normative psychological crisis. The term "crisis" emphasizes the moment of imbalance. New needs appear, and a restructuring of the motivational sphere of the individual begins. A crisis is a state of emotional and mental stress that requires a significant change in ideas about the world and oneself in a short period of time. Often, such a revision of ideas entails changes in the structure of the personality. These changes can be both positive and negative. A person in crisis, by definition, cannot remain the same. A person in a crisis either manages to meet with himself, with traumatic circumstances or memories and turn them into a source of new resources and life values, or he fails to comprehend his current traumatic experience, and then he continues to operate with familiar, stereotyped categories or use habitual models of adaptation . With this approach, crises are presented as extremely important moments in the life path of an individual. Crises are “life chances”, points of growth at which a change in the human Self occurs, if we consider the Self as a living self-organizing system. Crises are opportunities for choosing a new form of self, that is, for changing self-identity. Crises mark a transition from one stable phase to another, the destruction of the old, obsolete and the release of space for the new. Thus, the Little Mermaid’s unsatisfied needs related to receiving care and love again appear on the stage of her internal theater, and the nature of the experience of the crisis will allow her to either learn to recognize and satisfy her own needs, or to aggravate existing problems. During the Little Mermaid’s experience of the crisis of initiation, an action occurs that which clearly illustrates her personality. “Finally, she turned fifteen years old.” “Well, they raised you too!” said the grandmother, the dowager queen. “Come here, we need to dress you up, like the other sisters!” And she put a wreath of white lilies, - each petal was half a pearl, - then, to indicate the high rank of the princess, she ordered eight oysters to cling to her tail. “Oh, how painful!” exclaimed the Little Mermaid. “For the sake of beauty, it’s not a sin to suffer!” said the old woman. Ah, With what pleasure the Little Mermaid would have thrown off all these dresses and the heavy wreath—the red flowers from her garden suited her much better—but she didn’t dare! “Goodbye!” she said, and lightly and smoothly, like an air bubble, rose to the surface.” Depression and Aggression We notice that the Little Mermaid is in pain, but does not try to relieve it. And then, throughout the entire story, she never fights, does not insist on her own, does not demand what she needs. This happens because the Little Mermaid is deprived of contact with her Self and her desires. In addition, the environment is not able to understand the Little Mermaid, support her and relationships with her. Perhaps if the grandmother did not have to raise five more granddaughters and deal with government affairs, she would have noticed the emotional suffering of the Little Mermaid. But the grandmother is busy with the formal, social aspects of her granddaughter’s life. She doesn't notice her needs or her psychological pain. The Little Mermaid, in turn, internalized this attitude: she is not aware of her desires and does not know how to express and satisfy them, is not able to build deep trusting relationships with others, to ask for help and care. The Little Mermaid is notrealizes her envy and anger towards her sisters who have already matured - she silently waits for her fifteenth birthday. This is because “the oral character is fundamentally out of touch with its aggression and hostility” (Johnson, 2001, p. 38). She does not dare to contradict her grandmother, does not dare to declare what she wants... Her typical state can be described as constant sadness: “depression is used as a protective suppression of aggression, hostility” (Johnson, 2001, p. 38). M. Klein in her works proposed a model that describes the roots of depressive anxieties in the early relationship of a child with his mother. The child, being in contact with his mother, over time begins to perceive her as a “good mother”: as a person who can restrain his fear and its destructiveness. After all, his mother takes care of him and loves him. At the same time, part of the child’s anger is projected onto the mother, who at these moments is perceived as “bad.” Over time, the child introjects the “good”, strong mother, learns to cope with his aggression, restrains his destructiveness, and projects less of his hostility onto her. But at the same time, his good and bad feelings are experienced as if they were directed towards different people: he loves a good, caring mother and hates a bad, abandoning, punishing mother. When the “moment of truth” comes, the child begins to understand that “bad” and A “good” mother is different aspects of the same person. At this moment, the child is faced with the experience that the mother on whom he depends and whom he loves is the same mother whom he hates and attacks. Understanding these facts of existence entails mental pain and painful experiences. The child begins to fear that his aggressiveness and greed will “spoil” his mother and deplete her strength. It was this anxiety about the safety and well-being of a loved one that M. Klein called depressive anxiety. It is at this stage that the child especially needs contact with his mother. He needs to make sure that, despite his hostility, she still loves him, cares about him, that she is okay. Only in this way will he learn to distinguish fantasies and internal reality, where the mother can appear weak and exhausted, from external reality, where everything is fine with her. Depressive experiences lead to feelings such as guilt, sadness, and grief. If these feelings are tolerable for the child, he begins to use them for changes: he tries to be caring, cause less trouble to the mother, please her with his behavior, and control manifestations of anger. However, the anger does not disappear anywhere - it is simply held back. Growing up, the child receives many opportunities to correct the harm caused to the mother - both real and existing in fantasies. Reparation (from the Latin reparatio - restoration, renewal) takes on various forms: help from the mother, good performance at school, exemplary behavior. The desire to make reparation stimulates the development of skills, abilities, and interests. Thus, one of the tasks solved through development is the search for an answer to the question: can love survive when attacked by hatred? Doubts about one's good qualities lead to disappointment in oneself and in the ability to protect a loved one. In order to avoid painful feelings of guilt, children and adults continue to use such defense mechanisms as dissociation (I don’t feel angry), projection (they are angry and want destruction), denial (I’m not like that), etc. What happens when Are the processes described above interrupted before reaching their logical conclusion? We see this with the example of the Little Mermaid. Even when a parent leaves a child for a while, the latter becomes angry and feels uncomfortable. In the event of the death of the mother during the separation-individuation phase, the child’s familiar world collapses. The mother does not return, and the deputies cannot compensate for her loss. However, an abandoned, disappointed baby still tries to adapt to the situation. It is obvious that constant suffering, despair and protest do not change anything and lead tosevere psychological pain. Therefore, the child seeks a compromise that allows him to survive in a situation of despair and chronic unsatisfaction of needs. When a child is faced with unbearable experiences, he begins to suppress his self in order to somehow cope with the pain. This process is especially traumatic in a situation where the child’s self and its natural autoexpression are in their infancy. CM. Johnson says that in the case of an oral character, the child forms the following belief: “If I don’t want anything, then I will not experience frustration ... If I am forced to suffer because of my needs, then I will stop demanding altogether” (Johnson, 2001 , p. 114).The death of her mother probably led the Little Mermaid to unconscious fantasies about her destructiveness, “badness,” destructiveness and danger. Therefore, throughout the entire story, the Little Mermaid never shows aggression towards others. The unintegrated aspects of the “good” and “bad” parts of the heroine’s mother do not allow her to integrate her own Self. Thus, the Little Mermaid develops a special way of relating to herself and the world. Like other oral personalities, the Little Mermaid “will exhibit polarity in behavior, views and visible feelings - a tendency to selflessly cling to other people, a fear of loneliness and abandonment, as well as very modest self-care skills while simultaneously being unwilling to express her needs and ask about helping, being overly caring towards other people” (Johnson, 2001, p. 112). Reparation and defense mechanisms At the beginning of the story, the Little Mermaid is distanced from her environment. She rather observes life than lives. Her garden is decorated with a statue of a beautiful marble boy who seems to be a substitute object: someone she can love and admire without the threat of losing him. Growing up, she does not change, and only initiation gives hope that the Little Mermaid, having survived the crisis, will resolve earlier problems and find herself. The long-awaited event - the opportunity to see the surface of the sea - brought the Little Mermaid a huge amount of impressions. Noise, music, bright colors and a handsome young prince who simply bewitched our heroine, who had previously seen only one male object, not counting the marble boy, his father. The day is coming to an end, it is getting dark, but the Little Mermaid “cannot take her eyes off the ship and the handsome prince.” She is excited, excited, intoxicated by freedom and new possibilities. At this time, the weather begins to change, and after a while a storm breaks out over the sea! “The ship groaned and creaked, thick planks cracked, waves rolled over the deck; the mainmast broke like a reed, the ship capsized on its side, and water poured into the hold.” Thus, the first impressions that the Little Mermaid receives after her initiation are related to the fact that everything beautiful, everything that you are just beginning to love, turns out to be destroyed by the ruthless elements! The Little Mermaid already had such an experience - the experience of losing her mother. That is why the “meeting” of the Little Mermaid with the prince is so unusual, from the point of view of generally accepted norms and rules. The traditional version of the meeting, universally presented in the genres of fairy tales and myths as a reflection of mass everyday consciousness, involves the rescue of a girl by a male hero, who for this must perform a series of heroic actions (kill the Dragon, Koshchei the Immortal, the Serpent Gorynych, etc.) In the female unconscious there is image of a male rescuer. In our case, everything happens just the opposite, namely: the Little Mermaid becomes the rescuer. “The little mermaid looked for the prince with her eyes and, when the ship sank, she saw that the prince had plunged into the water. At first, the Little Mermaid was very happy that he would now fall to their bottom, but then she remembered that people cannot live in water and that he could only sail to her father’s palace dead. No, no, he must not die! And she swam between the logs and boards, completely forgetting that they could crush her at any moment. I had to dive into the very depths and then take offupward along with the waves, but finally she overtook the prince, who was almost completely exhausted; I could no longer swim on the stormy sea; his arms and legs refused to serve him, and his lovely eyes closed; he would have died if the Little Mermaid had not come to his aid. She lifted his head above the water and let the waves carry them both wherever they wanted.” So, risking her own life, our heroine rushes to save the prince. The Little Mermaid begins reparations - however, for a number of reasons, the prince now acts as the maternal object. Displacement and projection of feelings, experiences, desires from one person (object) to another is a classic “mistake” of our unconscious. Having lost her mother in infancy, the Little Mermaid remains the child who is looking for care, warmth, and love. Due to the action of defense mechanisms, this object turns out to be the prince. Therefore, the Little Mermaid literally falls in love with the prince himself and his world at first sight. She has no doubts, no hesitation, risking her life to save a stranger whom she has seen for the first time. And this is not surprising. On the one hand, having not received the necessary time to “unfold” all internal structures in contact with her mother, she remained a child who did not completely distinguish between herself and the object. Traumatically interrupted contact with her mother led to the fact that, physically an adult, the Little Mermaid behaves in many ways like a child, not realizing her actions and desires. She does not understand what boundaries are and is not in touch with the aggressive part of herself that is necessary to build them. The initiation associated with the transition to a qualitatively new level did not allow solving early developmental problems, but only again exacerbated old traumas, and the Little Mermaid never integrated her impulses associated with love and aggression. On the other hand, there were no real men in her former life and experience of contact with them, and she heard about the world of people only from the stories of her grandmother. This situation promotes active fantasy and the construction of an ideal object. In conditions of information deficiency, projection mechanisms are activated, “finishing” the real object to the level of the ideal. We are dealing with one of the effects of interpersonal perception - an attribution, accurately recorded in one of the once popular songs - “I blinded you from what was, and then I fell in love with what was.” In the Little Mermaid's life experience there are only grandmother's stories about what is on the surface of the ocean, and a sculpture of a marble boy. One after another, the older sisters float to the surface and enthusiastically talk about the wonders of the surface world. It is not surprising that the Little Mermaid has very high, idealized expectations of both the land and the people who live there. She, like Pushkinskaya Tatiana (also, by the way, lived in an “emotionally poor environment” - in the wilderness), was ready to meet her prince - the one who would return her lost paradise, who would love her the way she loved her Mother. Let's return to the text by G.Kh. Andersen. “By morning the bad weather subsided; not a sliver of the ship remained; the sun shone again over the water, and its bright rays seemed to return their vibrant color to the prince’s cheeks, but his eyes still did not open. The little mermaid brushed the hair from the prince's forehead and kissed his high, beautiful forehead; it seemed to her that the prince looked like the marble boy standing in her garden; she kissed him again and wished him to live.” It seems that the Little Mermaid’s love for her mother, projected on the marble boy, has now transferred to the prince. The Little Mermaid has finally found someone she can love and whose reciprocity she can hope for. Self and Social Support Systems However, despite her accomplished feat, the Little Mermaid becomes an “unknown hero.” The prince comes to his senses when the Little Mermaid has already left him on the shore and swam away. Obviously, the Little Mermaid's skills related to self-presentation and self-care were not sufficiently developed. People with this character structure tend to satisfy the needs of other people rather than present their own. MermaidI just saw that “the prince came to life and smiled at everyone who was near him. But he didn’t smile at her, he didn’t even know that she saved his life! The Little Mermaid felt sad, and when the prince was taken into a large white building, she sadly dived into the water and swam home. Before she was quiet and thoughtful, but now she became even quieter, even more thoughtful. The sisters asked her what she saw for the first time on the surface of the sea, but she didn’t tell them anything.” The little mermaid is again alone with her fantasies and experiences. Initiation did not change her, but only actualized the old trauma. She again found and lost a significant object. Despite having a father, sisters and grandmother, she does not have a close friend with whom she can share her deep feelings and dreams. It seems that relations in the family are quite formal - no one was worried that the girl, who had previously been conditionally “locked up”, disappeared for the whole night, and then did not tell anyone anything. The Little Mermaid’s depressive state does not go away - it gets worse: “Often in the evening and in the morning she sailed to the place where she left the prince, saw how the fruits ripened in the gardens, how they were then collected, saw how the snow melted on the high mountains, but the prince was so I didn’t see her again and returned home sadder each time. Her only joy was to sit in her garden, wrapping her arms around a beautiful marble statue that looked like a prince, but she no longer looked after the flowers; they grew as they wanted, along the paths and on the paths, intertwined their stems and leaves with the branches of the tree, and it became completely dark in the garden.” The darkness in the garden is a metaphor for what is happening in the soul of the Little Mermaid. She lacks inner strength, she sinks deeper and deeper into sadness and depression. However, she temporarily manages to resolve her deep internal crisis, which once again repeats the story of early infancy - the acquisition of intimacy and its loss. This time the Little Mermaid turns to her family for help. The family is the source of both the most powerful traumas and endless resources. By entrusting her story to one of her sisters, the Little Mermaid experiences support from significant others. The sisters helped the Little Mermaid find out where the prince's kingdom and palace were, and find the way to the object of her love. The Deficient Self and the Impossible Sisters can be seen as another aspect of the Little Mermaid’s Self, more adapted to reality, more flexible, capable of different reactions, of choosing new ways to solve problems in situations where the old ones do not work. But the Little Mermaid only briefly comes into contact with these aspects of her Self. This is clear from the text: instead of real interaction with her sisters and with representatives of the underwater world, the Little Mermaid begins to constantly swim to the shore, look at the prince walking or boating, and plunge deeper and deeper into fantasy. “More than once she heard fishermen talking about the prince as they fished at night; they told a lot of good things about him, and the Little Mermaid was glad that she saved his life when she carried him, half-dead, along the waves; she remembered how his head rested on her chest and how tenderly she kissed him then. But he didn’t know anything about her, he couldn’t even dream of her!” She falls more and more in love with the image she created, and it becomes more and more difficult for her to return to her real world. “The Little Mermaid began to love people more and more, she was drawn to them more and more; their earthly world seemed to her much larger than her underwater one; After all, they could sail across the sea on their ships, climb high mountains to the very clouds, and their land with forests and fields stretched far, far away, you couldn’t even see it with your eyes!” She is drawn to the Impossible, to the world that she observes as a spectator and in which she has no place. The Little Mermaid is trying to understand this world, but the sisters around her do not have the information themselves, and she has to ask her grandmother again and again: “If people don’t drown,” asked the Little Mermaid, “then they live forever, don’t die like us?” “You!” answered the old woman. “They also die, their life is even shorter than ours.” We live for three hundred years, but when our end comes, we are not buriedamong loved ones, we don’t even have graves, we just turn into sea foam. We are not given an immortal soul, and we are never resurrected; We are like a reed: if you pull it up by the roots, it will not grow green again! People, on the contrary, have an immortal soul that lives forever even after the body turns to dust; she flies to the sky, straight to the twinkling stars! Just as we can rise from the bottom of the sea and see the land where people live, so they can rise after death to unknown blissful countries that we will never see! “Why don’t we have an immortal soul?” asked the Little Mermaid sadly. “I would gave all her hundreds of years for one day of human life, so that later she too could ascend to heaven.” Here we again see the Little Mermaid’s sacrifice - she is ready to give all of herself in order to at least a little be someone who she is not. In therapeutic settings, this happens with clients who have no idea about their Self, do not know themselves and therefore idealize external objects. The therapist's task in this situation is to return the client to his experiences and feelings about his identity. Often, clients do not understand what the therapist wants from them: they ask again, talk about other people or minor events, get lost... Inviting the client to tell something about themselves, asking “How do you feel when you tell me about who you are and what kind of person you are?” , “What do you want”, etc. are the beginning of painstaking work to restore the client’s self from those early traumas that caused such severe damage to his psyche. However, the Little Mermaid’s grandmother is not a psychotherapist and in response to a strong desire to get to earth, she does not try to understand its origins, but devalues ​​it. “- Nonsense! There’s no point in thinking about it!” said the old woman. “We live much better here than people on earth!” The grandmother does not notice the boundaries between her Self and the Little Mermaid Self: she lives quite well in the underwater world, and she does not see or realize suffering granddaughters. Grandmother obeys the rules and laws, she is proud of herself and attaches great importance to social status and its attributes. Raising such a person does not promote self-understanding, but usually leads to the formation of a symbiotic personality, unable to detect the difference between “I” and “not-I”. However, the Little Mermaid is in crisis and is trying to move forward from the point where she was before, which is why she is trying to confront her grandmother. “That means I will die, I will become sea foam, I will no longer hear the music of the waves, I will not see wonderful flowers and red sunshine! Is there really no way I can find an immortal soul? “You can,” said the grandmother, “if one of the people loves you so much that you become dearer to him than his father and mother, if he surrenders to you with all his heart and all his thoughts and tells the priest to join your hands as a sign of eternal fidelity to each other; then a particle of his soul will be communicated to you and someday you will taste eternal bliss. He will give you his soul and keep his own. But this will never happen! After all, what is considered beautiful among us, your fish tail, for example, people find ugly; they know nothing about beauty; in their opinion, in order to be beautiful, you must certainly have two clumsy supports - legs, as they call them. The little mermaid took a deep breath and looked sadly at her fish tail.” “Return of the soul” is only possible through therapy. In the format of a therapeutic relationship, the therapist performs a maternal function for the client, becoming for him a “good mother” - unconditionally accepting, sensitive, empathetic - exactly the kind that he lacked in the early stages of development. But at the same time he maintains a therapeutic position: “He will give you a soul and keep his own.” This is a very accurate metaphor for the therapeutic relationship. In real relationships, “...this will never happen!” Without satisfying their needs in contact with significant loved ones that are relevant for a specific period of development (in our case, the needs for attachment), people throughout their lives will be in search of such ideal relationships in the hopeend the situation. But it is really unrealistic to do this, since it is difficult to imagine that your partner is ready to become such a “mother” for you. However, the Little Mermaid is trying to find such a partner by changing her “mermaid” identity to a human one. But the world of people for the Little Mermaid is a world of the Impossible. There are things we cannot change and things we need to accept. This is our gender and our age. It is with the acceptance of this fact that we accept reality and the boundaries between genders and generations that exist in it. For the Little Mermaid, the world of the Impossible also includes the structure of the body. She is different from humans - she has a tail below the waist, and not two legs, like an ordinary person. She is beautiful in her own world, but that is not enough for her. The grandmother tells her directly: what you have is considered ugly in the human world, but the Little Mermaid does not hear her grandmother. The enchanting and alluring world of people took possession of her soul. She cannot think about anything else - only about the Impossible, about what has an insurmountable boundary, the presence of which she does not want to notice and admit. Mother and the Witch In the evening, a ball is held in the palace where the Little Mermaid lives. However, all the splendor, all the colors of the underwater world do not please the Little Mermaid. Obsessed with one idea, one thought, the Little Mermaid is in her experiences. She is distracted for a while: “In the middle of the hall, water flowed in a wide stream, and mermen and mermaids danced in it to their wonderful singing. People don’t have such sonorous, gentle voices. The little mermaid sang best, and everyone clapped her hands. For a moment she felt cheerful at the thought that no one anywhere, neither in the sea nor on land, had such a wonderful voice as hers; but then she again began to think about the above-water world, about the handsome prince, and she felt sad that she did not have an immortal soul.” The Little Mermaid has recognized beauty and a wonderful voice, but she is not happy about it. She dreams of the Impossible - of what she does not have, and is not able to appreciate what she has. Like all oral personalities, the Little Mermaid is not self-sufficient. Her attitude to the world can only change in a situation of acquiring an object of dependence, when the “holes”, the deficit in her Self, metaphorically described as the absence of a soul, will be filled by someone else. An earthly person, that is, living in a different element, with solid ground under his feet, must share with the Little Mermaid a part of his soul, his Self. And only then will she gain a chance to become complete and self-sufficient, capable of receiving joy and pleasure from life. Therefore, nothing pleases The little mermaid, and she leaves the merry holiday. “She slipped away unnoticed from the palace, and while they were singing and having fun, she sat sadly in her garden. Suddenly the sounds of French horns reached her from above, and she thought: “Here he is riding a boat again! How I love him! More than father and mother! I belong to him with all my heart, with all my thoughts, I would willingly give him the happiness of my whole life! I would do anything - just to be with him and find an immortal soul! While the sisters are dancing in my father’s palace, I’ll swim to the sea witch; I was always afraid of her, but maybe she will advise something or help me in some way!” So, in despair, unable to think rationally, the Little Mermaid makes an impulsive decision - to turn to the witch for help. All her dreams and plans are concentrated on finding her soul - her Self - by entrusting herself and her life to the prince. The little mermaid never tries to think critically - she acts as if possessed. All her vital energy, all her thoughts, fantasies, plans are addressed to the prince, who has become the embodiment of her deficient need for close relationships that will allow the structures that did not receive proper development in the traumatically interrupted contact with her mother to “grow”, “ripen.” And the Little Mermaid swam from her garden to the stormy whirlpools behind which the witch lived. She had never sailed this way before; neither flowers nor even grass grew here - there was only bare gray sand all around; the water in the whirlpools bubbled and rustled, as if under mill wheels, and carried with it into the depths everything thatI just met on the way. The little mermaid had to swim just between such seething whirlpools; further the path to the witch’s dwelling lay through the bubbling silt; The witch called this place her peat bog. And there it was just a stone's throw away from her home, surrounded by a strange forest: instead of trees and bushes, polyps grew in it, half-animals, half-plants, similar to hundred-headed snakes sticking straight out of the sand; their branches were like long slimy arms with fingers wriggling like worms; The polyps never stopped moving all their joints for a minute, from the root to the very top; with flexible fingers they grabbed everything they came across and never let go. The little mermaid paused in fear, her heart beat with fear, she was ready to return, but she remembered the prince, the immortal soul, and gathered her courage: she tied her long hair tightly around her head so that the polyps would not cling to it, crossed her arms on her chest and, like the fish swam between the disgusting polyps, which stretched their wriggling fingers towards her. She saw how tightly, as if with iron pincers, they held with their fingers everything that they managed to grab: the white skeletons of drowned people, ship rudders, boxes, animal bones, even one little mermaid. The polyps caught and strangled her. It was the scariest thing!” This part of the story is riddled with fear. In the little mermaid strangled by polyps, there is an allusion to the impossibility for our heroine to break out of her familiar world and cross the border. On the one hand, the heroine has a strong desire to change, and on the other, an equally strong fear of dying. O. Rank believed that in human life there are only two forms of fear, the source of which is the primary trauma of birth: fear of life and fear of death. The first - fear of life - is associated with the dangers of reality, with leaving the mother's body in the world, with independence, loneliness, choice, the need to find one's self. The second fear - fear of death - reminds every person of his purpose and the constant danger of not finding true identity , living someone else’s life instead of your own, not having time to become yourself. Thus, the fear of death serves as a reliable incentive that forces a person to realize his life plan. The best way to overcome this fear is not to run away from it by using various defense mechanisms, but to become aware of what is hidden behind it. All aggressive and auto-aggressive actions that occur throughout the story are due to the Little Mermaid’s attempts to find herself and the fear that she will die without finding her Self. However, the Little Mermaid, unaware of her desires, fears and anxieties, tries to defend herself. In an attempt to find herself, the Little Mermaid uses the following defense mechanisms: identification - attributing one's own identity to other people, borrowing identity from others, or merging the identity of one's own and someone else's (attempting to become a girl by abandoning one's "mermaid" identity); transference - a process in which feelings are transferred from one object to another, which becomes a substitute for the original object (mother - marble boy - prince); inversion - turning feelings, thoughts, desires into their opposite (pain when walking turns into laughter and joy from communicating with the prince); turning against oneself - redirection of negative affect related to an external object to oneself (aggression towards the prince is transformed into auto-aggression). All of this is defense of an oral nature. Dreaming of uniting and merging with the prince, the Little Mermaid risks her life, experiences pain and horror, but continues to persistently pursue her goal. Another person is of much greater value to the Little Mermaid than herself, because the heroine has the illusion that only through another she can find herself. Thus, the vital task of finding oneself is carried out in a very “crooked” way - through an attempt to merge, identify with another. Stopped in her development, the Little Mermaid is not able to “jump” over the step and is trying to return to the symbioticphase. It seems that only after passing it is it possible to move on to the stage of separation-individuation, therefore all attempts to find oneself are doomed to failure without experiencing the stage of intimacy and mutual understanding. However, the Little Mermaid does not know about this - and therefore believes in the help of the witch. “But she (the Little Mermaid) found herself in a slippery forest clearing... In the middle of the clearing a house was built from white human bones; The sea witch herself sat right there and fed the toad from her mouth, like people feed sugar to little canaries. She called the disgusting snakes her chicks and allowed them to crawl on her large spongy chest.” The sea witch, the equivalent of Baba Yaga in Slavic fairy tales, is one of the most striking female images. V. Dahl wrote that Baba Yaga is “a kind of witch or an evil spirit under the guise of an ugly old woman.” The Sea Witch, a formidable-looking deity, wields vast power. Polyps, a house made of human bones - all these are attributes of the border between the kingdom of the living and the kingdom of the dead. The witch belongs to both worlds - which is why the Little Mermaid hopes that she will help her get into the world of people. Usually the witch tests heroes, helping only those who have passed the test. The test is the journey to her home itself, dangerous and threatening her very existence. Another little mermaid who was caught and strangled by polyps is a reminder that our lives are finite. It is interesting that in Slavic fairy tales, in the rites of initiation and dedication (to the shovel - and to the stove), Baba Yaga also acts for teenagers as a guide to the world of adults. The Little Mermaid turns to the Witch for a pass into the world of the Impossible. The image of the Witch personifies the maternal unconscious element, the evil, “bad” Mother. Of interest is the fact that the Witch, in fact, is the only mother of the Little Mermaid. The remaining parental objects are either unable to take care of her, like a grandmother, or are simply absent from her life, like a father. Of the two possibilities - not to have any mother or to have a bad one - the Little Mermaid chooses the second, because, despite all the negative aspects, the witch is ready to help the Little Mermaid. “I know, I know why you came!” the sea witch said to the Little Mermaid. “You’re up to nonsense, but I’ll still help you—it’s bad luck for you, my beauty!” You want to get rid of your tail and get two supports instead so that you can walk like people; you want the young prince to love you, and you would receive an immortal soul!” The witch acts in this story as a maternal object, she knows and understands what the child wants, but does not explain to him why this desire does not need to be satisfied. A witch is a sadistic mother who, unlike a child, is quite capable of assessing the consequences of his self-destructive intentions. However, she is willing to support him in such self-destructive behavior. The Witch embodies aggressive impulses that are necessary to build boundaries, to assert one’s Self. However, if the Witch is not balanced by a “good mother,” a person possessed by an inner witch will be extremely destructive - for others or for himself. Obviously, when the child has not yet developed the mature ability to commit choice, he needs a mother who can explain to him how to do the right thing without supporting his destructive and self-destructive intentions; in a mother capable of containing his fear and rage. The older the child, the more difficult it is to keep him, through explanations and persuasion, from various actions that are inadequate, from the point of view of society. Normally, over time, a child develops internal “holding” structures: guilt, shame, conscience. The Little Mermaid, deprived of contact with a caring, accepting and understanding mother in childhood, does not possess such mature internal structural components and is able to interact only with the inner Witch - an object consisting of the introjected negative part of the mother's image. This is an evil, taking away, destroying and absorbing mother. But the Little Mermaid has no other mother, and therefore everything that the real Witch does is taken for granted by her. “Okay, you came at the right time!”the witch continued. “...I will make you a drink, you will take it, swim with it to the shore before sunrise, sit there and drink every drop; then your tail will fork and turn into a pair of slender, as people would say, legs. But it will hurt you as if you were pierced with a sharp sword. But everyone who sees you will say that they have never met such a lovely girl! You will maintain your smooth, gliding gait - not a single dancer can compare with you; but remember that you will walk as if on the edge of a knife and your legs will bleed. Will you endure all this? Then I will help you.” “Yes!” said the Little Mermaid in a trembling voice and thought about the prince and the immortal soul.” The Little Mermaid does not think about herself - she does not recognize herself as a separate person who has value, the right to be special. She thinks about something else - about the prince, and about what she doesn’t have, but people have - about the soul. “Remember,” said the witch, “that once you take on a human form, you will never become a mermaid again!” You will not see the bottom of the sea, nor your father’s house, nor your sisters! And if the prince does not love you so much that he forgets both father and mother for your sake, does not give himself to you with all his heart and does not order the priest to join your hands so that you become husband and wife, you will not receive an immortal soul. From the very first dawn after his marriage to another, your heart will break into pieces, and you will become the foam of the sea! “Let it be!” said the Little Mermaid and turned pale as death.” The Witch tries to tell the Little Mermaid about the dangerous consequences of such a choice, but it is no longer possible to stop her. The Little Mermaid's diffuse identity contains internalized aspects of the evil, destructive mother, and she treats herself with extreme disdain and indifference to her future fate. The mother determines the image of the world. The Little Mermaid’s lack of soul also symbolizes her own absence, weakness, fragility in this world. In psychotherapeutic terms, the absence of a soul can be defined as an unformed identity. A child is an open system that constantly interacts with the outside world. Through these interactions, the child creates his own inner world, the world of his Self. In the further process of individuation, the child builds his own identity. He begins to perceive himself as different from others. If a “failure” occurs in development, the child retains the illusion of merging with the archaic image of the mother of his early childhood. Identity is not formed, which is experienced by the child as a feeling of internal emptiness. The mother’s function in this process is to act, on the one hand, as a shield against stimuli destructive to the child, and on the other, as a mediator who decodes the child’s messages and gives adequate responses to them. The image of the mother in the child's perception depends on her ability to modify physical or psychological pain. When a child is sick, scared, hurt or angry, there is nothing he can do about these conditions. The mother acts as an object capable of bringing him peace and alleviating suffering. If the relationship between the mother and the baby is “good enough,” in his consciousness, from the original body-psychic matrix (N. McDougall’s term), the image of himself and the image of the mother begin to differentiate. The child, using various processes of internalization (incorporation, introjection, identification) will construct an image of the mother as calming, caring, and capable of containing his emotions. These ideas are the basis of his Self. In the case when a child does not have the opportunity to create an image of a calming and caring mother, to identify with this “inner” mother, the absence of an internal protective figure continues into adulthood. The image of the mother in such cases may be split. On the one hand, there is an idealized and unattainable image of an omnipotent mother who can help in any situation and satisfy his every desire. The child tries to find this “ideal mother” by projecting the desired qualities onto objects of attachment already in adulthood. For the Little Mermaid like thisthe object becomes the prince. On the other hand, the child also has the image of a rejecting, punishing, bad mother; in our story, this is the image of a witch. If it is predominant, as the child grows older, he begins to identify with these aspects and treat himself in the same way as the “bad” inner mother. In a situation where the child’s father plays an unnoticeable role in his life and is presented in his inner world as a person indifferent to his childhood existence (which is what we see in Andersen’s story), then such a child will subsequently act as a terribly inattentive parent in relation to himself. to yourself. Growing up, such people tend to either care for others or seek addictive substitution to compensate for the harm caused to them. The Little Mermaid’s indifferent and destructive self-attitude is a consequence of the loss of her loving mother and life with an indifferent father. Inner witch, auto-aggression and alexithymia When the witch tells the Little Mermaid that she must pay her for her help, the reader may experience pity for the heroine and a desire to stop, to keep her from reckless act. The witch tells the Little Mermaid: “You have a wonderful voice, and with it you think to charm the prince, but you must give this voice to me. I will take the best that you have for my priceless drink: after all, I must mix my own blood into the drink so that it becomes as sharp as a sword blade. “If you take my voice, what will remain for me?” asked the Little Mermaid. Your lovely face, your smooth gait and your talking eyes - this is enough to conquer the human heart! Well, that's enough, don't be afraid; stick out your tongue, and I will cut it off in payment for the magic drink! - Good! - said the Little Mermaid, and the witch put a cauldron on the fire to brew a drink... - Take it! - said the witch, giving the Little Mermaid the drink; and the Little Mermaid became mute - she could no longer sing or speak!” The Little Mermaid sacrifices what she really has - her beautiful voice - in order to cope with depression caused by the frustration of the needs for intimacy, care, love. Freud pointed out that “sadness is always a reaction to the loss of a loved one or an abstract concept that has replaced him, such as fatherland, freedom, ideal, etc. (Freud, 2002, p. 13). Early loss of a mother - loss of one's “good part” - loss of voice are interconnected and mutually transformative processes. The constant sacrifices that the Little Mermaid makes throughout the story are due to her strong desire to belong, to be together to fill the “empties” in her soul. Undifferentiated Self leads to the inability to distinguish between good and bad, real and false. So, the Little Mermaid, whose heart is ready to burst from melancholy and sadness, does not dare to enter her father’s house. Instead of asking for help, talking about her pain and hope, she just picks a flower from each sister’s garden, sends air kisses to her family and rises to the surface of the sea. It seems that the Little Mermaid’s mental pain is so great that her physical pain does not go with her comparison. After drinking the drink, she loses consciousness, and when she wakes up, she discovers that the promised transformation has happened to her: instead of a tail, she has two legs, like an ordinary person. However, having received the Impossible, the Little Mermaid does not stop suffering, only physical pain is added to the psychological pain. “The witch told the truth: every step caused the Little Mermaid such pain as if she were walking on sharp knives and needles; but she patiently endured the pain and walked hand in hand with the prince, light as an air bubble; the prince and everyone around only marveled at her wonderful, sliding gait.” When analyzing the fairy tale, it is necessary to dwell on what the tail symbolizes. On the one hand, this is a necessary attribute of belonging to the water element. It is because of the tail that the Little Mermaid looks not only like an ordinary girl, but also like a fish. Translated into the language of metaphors, “fish” is a cold, sexually frozen woman. And this is very accurately noted: The Little Mermaid is not a woman, she is a child. Her sexuality has not awakened, and therefore she remains chaste throughoutthe whole fairy tale. An external change - the transformation of a tail into a pair of legs - did not lead to internal changes. Recently, we are increasingly encountering a situation where, in search of their spiritual self, people try to change their physical self. The growing popularity of plastic surgery, the emergence of programs and series promoting changes in one’s physicality (“Doctor Hollywood”, “Terribly Beautiful”, etc.) are a reflection of the desire to cope with inner emptiness by modifying the physical shell. However, such a transformation usually does not bring the desired result. So, the Little Mermaid has found what she has been striving for: she is next to the prince. But now she is mute and cannot speak. The muteness is a reflection of the "voids" in her identity that cannot be filled without contact with the inner, spiritual (not physical) aspects of her Self. The muteness also reflects the Little Mermaid's inability to talk about her feelings. It is at this moment that her alexithymia is most clearly revealed. Alexithymia usually refers to the inability to understand and explain to others one’s experiences and states, as well as the difficulty of differentiating oneself from a symbiotic partner. A characteristic of alexithymia is a poor understanding of affects and the inability to verbalize them. Feelings and emotions lose their signaling functions, which leads to ineffective communication. Psychosomatic patients, for example, often ignore signals about somatic or mental ill-being, which outwardly manifests itself in restraint, frozen poses, and a “wooden” facial expression. The Little Mermaid demonstrates alexithymia throughout the second part of the story: every step causes her pain, but she bears it patiently. “….The little mermaid danced and danced, although every time her feet touched the ground, she felt so much pain, as if she were walking on sharp knives. ... they climbed high mountains, and although blood oozed from her legs and everyone saw it, she laughed and continued to follow the prince to the very peaks...” Alexithymics are characterized by concrete thinking, and they may seem adapted to the demands of reality. However, during psychotherapy, their cognitive impairments become apparent: they generally lack imagination, intuition, empathy, and drive-oriented fantasy. They focus, first of all, on the material world, and treat themselves as mechanisms, inanimate objects. Due to disruptions in communication, which was a consequence of the Little Mermaid’s alexithymia, the prince never recognizes her as his savior. She just looks at him with her beautiful eyes - but says nothing. He treats the Little Mermaid only as a child, which, in essence, she continues to be. A child who is ready to sacrifice himself, to ignore his pain, just to be close to an object dear to him. “The oral character knows how to wait, how to yearn for someone who will bring love, and when he finds a benefactor, he will cling to him with all his might so that he will never be lonely again” (Johnson, 2001). On the Road to Self However The Prince and the Little Mermaid, by definition, cannot be together. They are representatives of different elements. Water and earth are a metaphor for different levels of personality organization. Water is unstable, fluid, you can dissolve in it - dissolve... The earth is stable, you can rely on it, you can grow on it... It is known that pairs are formed by people with a similar level of organization. It is obvious that the pathology of the Little Mermaid is more pronounced - she is characterized by a diffuse identity, dependent tendencies, a tendency to depression as a result of auto-aggression, alexithymia... The Little Mermaid, a representative of the water element, cannot instantly become another - a stable, confident earthly woman. Although she is a mature girl in history, she remains a child in terms of psychological age, which is emphasized by the nature of the prince’s love for her: “he loved her only as a sweet, kind child; it never occurred to him to make her his wife and queen.” The initiation that the Little Mermaid underwent normally allowsa child girl to move to another social stratum - the stratum of girl brides. The normative task of the Little Mermaid at this stage is to find a suitable partner, and the peak, which marks a new round of development, is a wedding and transition to the category of women. But the Little Mermaid did not pass the test and did not become a bride. Why? The answer is simple: she is still a small child, and it is important for her to be in fusion with the “mother” object. “The normal symbiotic phase is a precondition for the separation of the child from the mother in the subsequent separation-individuation phase. Optimal human symbiosis is extremely important for changes in individuation and for the emergence of a cathectically stable “sense of identity”” (Mahler, McDevitt, 2005, p. 4). The Prince spends a lot of time with the Little Mermaid, treats her warmly, but does not consider her as a sexual object, kissing her parentally on the forehead. The Prince is a mature man, he is going to meet another girl, but he is not yet sure that he can love her, and gives the Little Mermaid false hopes. And the Little Mermaid, for whom the prince’s wedding to someone else means death, only sighs heavily and thinks: “I’m next to him, I see him every day, I can look after him, love him, give my life for him!” Without going through initiation, she remains a child, because children do not yet understand what death is and do not know about its irreversibility. When the prince meets the daughter of a king from a neighboring kingdom, he also makes a mistake - he mistakes her for his savior, and not the Little Mermaid. And this is no coincidence: he finds a suitable match for himself both in age and origin. This is an earthly girl, the daughter of a king from a neighboring state. The Little Mermaid is also a princess and the daughter of a king, but she and the prince are no match: after all, he needs an adult, mature girl. The fact that the prince's bride was raised in a monastery emphasizes the aspect of spirituality necessary for intimacy in a couple. The little mermaid is devoid of a soul - she is only trying to create a suitable outer shell, exposing her body to pain and suffering, but inside she remains a small child. She only looks like a girl, but her emotional and mental age does not correspond to her physical data. Having met a suitable girl, the prince tells the Little Mermaid that he is very happy: “What I did not dare to dream about has come true! You will rejoice at my happiness, you love me so much!” And again the Little Mermaid reacts as an alexithymic: “The Little Mermaid kissed his hand, and it seemed to her that her heart was about to burst with pain: his wedding would kill her, turn her into sea foam!” Although she is in great pain on the inside, she shows joy and acceptance on the outside. A child who hides and suppresses her feelings is ready to die because what matters most to her is that the object of her love is nearby. Suppressed aggression turns into auto-aggression and destroys the Little Mermaid from the inside. But even knowing that at dawn she will die, the Little Mermaid does not think about herself, but about the fact that “only one evening remains for her to stay with the one for whom she left her family and her father’s house, gave her wonderful voice and endured unbearable torment every day, which he had no idea about. Only this night remained for her to breathe the same air with him, to see the blue sea and starry sky, and then eternal night would come for her, without thoughts, without dreams.” Deprived of contact with her aggression, she is deprived of auto-expression, desires and the opportunity to defend her right to life. At this moment, her sisters try to help the Little Mermaid. They cut off and gave the witch their hair, a symbol of female beauty and attractiveness, in exchange for a knife - a weapon that could save the Little Mermaid if she killed the prince. “Before the sun rises, you must thrust it into the heart of the prince, and when his warm blood splashes on your feet, they will grow together again into a fish tail and you will again become a mermaid, go down to our sea and live your three hundred years before you turn into into salty sea foam. But hurry! Either he or you - one of you must die before the sun rises! This text illustrates the phenomenon of diffuse,unintegrated identity of the Little Mermaid. The sisters can be seen as split-off aggressive aspects of the Little Mermaid's self who are ready to destroy the object of their love. We are again faced with that stage in the child's development when he understands that his destructive impulses are directed at the very person who is the most significant and important in his life. So, we again see that the early traumas and disturbances of the Little Mermaid are deep and painful. The intention to destroy the prince is in the struggle with love for him. The Little Mermaid is again forced to solve the same problem: will her love survive, attacked by hatred? She hesitates for some time, but understands that she is not ready to continue living, having paid for it with the life of her loved one. To be alone again, having destroyed the prince, is equivalent to or even worse than death for her. The price is too high - so the Little Mermaid takes one last look at the prince and throws herself into the water, where a moment later she turns into sea foam. In this once again painful way, the Little Mermaid is differentiated from the object of her love. In reality, we often meet people who figuratively and literally die after losing their symbiotic partner. However, we are dealing with a fairy tale story, in which there is a continuation. The Little Mermaid notices that she is separated from the sea foam and rises up. Having passed into another state, she loses her physicality, but again finds her voice. It seems that we are facing another crisis in the life of the Little Mermaid - a crisis, thanks to which she acquires new qualities, new abilities, a new view of the world and a new Self. However, this Self is much closer to reality, because this is the childish Self, to which fate gives another a chance to live through traumatic episodes of development. “To whom am I going?” asked the Little Mermaid, rising in the air, and her voice sounded with such wondrous music that earthly sounds cannot convey. “To the daughters of the air!” the air creatures answered her. “At the mermaid’s.” There is no immortal soul, and it can only find it if a person loves it. Its eternal existence depends on someone else's will. The daughters of the air also do not have an immortal soul, but they can earn it through good deeds... Three hundred years will pass, during which we will do good as much as we can, and we will receive an immortal soul as a reward and will be able to experience the eternal bliss available to people. You, little water mermaid, with all your heart strove for the same thing as us, you loved and suffered, rise with us to the transcendental world. Now you yourself can, through good deeds, earn yourself an immortal soul and find it in three hundred years! And the Little Mermaid stretched out her transparent hands to the sun and for the first time felt tears in her eyes.” Tears in the eyes are the acquisition of sensitivity, contact with your childish, lonely and suffering Self. Mourning for what there is no longer hope - the love of a mother, the love of a prince, the possibility of being human - allows us to find agreement between the Forbidden and the Impossible (N. McDougall) thanks to the process of reparation. The little mermaid ceases to be lonely: she meets creatures just like herself. They understand her, they explain to her what happened to her, they accept her (literally into their ranks), they call her to rise with them and do good. This symbolizes the transition to a qualitatively new stage of development. Her refusal to destroy the prince as a love object provided an opportunity to process what had happened and give meaning to the suffering. If after the death of her mother the Little Mermaid was left depressed, split and alone, then here she has the opportunity to make reparation and earn an immortal soul with the help of good deeds - to find her true self. Despite the sadness that the fairy tale causes, it has a life-affirming ending. “During this time, everything on the ship began to move again, and the Little Mermaid saw the prince and his wife looking for her.” She sees that they are looking for her, which means that she is important, that the prince is not indifferent. The little mermaid did not cause any damage to the object of love, he is alive and well. “Invisible, the little mermaid kissed the beauty (the prince’s wife) on the forehead, smiled at the prince and stood up.