Sublime

The structural elements of the collective unconscious are named by Jung “archetypes” or “primordial images.” They are the pictorial forms of the instincts, for the unconscious reveals itself to the conscious mind in images which, as in dreams and fantasies, initiate the process of conscious reaction and assimilation.

the ugly sisters in Cinderella are really external symbols of the protagonist’s inner lack of self-esteem. By exorcizing, assimilating and thus neutering her antagonists, the story rids her of her own sense of inferiority and makes her whole.

We have already seen that reimagining moral responsibility in terms of debt—an impulse that cropped up in both Greece and India—while almost inevitable given the new economic circumstances, seems to prove uniformly unsatisfying.

Many of his tracts were written in German rather than in the Latin of the learned. These, combined with his efforts to translate the Bible into a language intelligible across the wide variety of dialects that stretched from the Netherlands to Poland, accelerated the birth of a modern German capable of serving as a language of culture.

Grass’s co-opting of animal fables, his extensive use of talking flounders, rats, and toads, grows from his absorption in the wonder tales of Germany, as collected by the Brothers Grimm.