People Get Caught in a Trap: You Can Run But You Can't Hide From the Self

A good quote from my current read, Alchemical Active Imagination, by Jung's famous student/acolyte/psychoanalyst and Latin/myth/fairy tale scholar Marie Louise Von Franz. The book is a study of a medieval alchemical text that illustrates how the early pseudoscience of alchemy was and is also as much an early psychoanalytical self analysis tool as it was a quest to turn dirt into gold.

Think of: Alice in Wonderland; The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe; or in heroic plays or epics, where the hero makes a decision and has to find his real powers or strenghts in order to overcome great adversity (Odysseus, Aeneas, Ceremony); or the anthithesis of this in tragedy, where the antihero fails (Richard the II, Hamlet, La Dolce Vita, Dr Faustus).

". . . if you think of an archetypal motif and of archetypal background, such as appears very often in myths and fairy tales, people get caught in a trap. They enter a castle and the door shuts behind them, and that always means that now they are in the Self. Now they have reached that point in their psyche where they can no longer run away from themselves. Now they are in for it, and the ego, which always flirts with the idea of getting away from what it ought to do, knows it is caught in the mousetrap and hirtherto has to fulfill the requirements of the Self and will not be released before that accomplishment.

"In all fairy tales and mythological patterns one is always released again, in spite of everything, but only after one has done the heroic deed. Trying to run away is no good, for you cannot escape [from the Self]."