“True love, the only magic strong enough to transcend realms.”
It seemed like poetry at first. A beautiful sentence, a statement about the elusive nature of love. Fit for a fairy tale. Magic strong enough to transcend realms. Vague, but pretty.
…until the realization hit there is something we call realms in our world. Realms of consciousness. Different states of awareness. Asleep, meditating, high, in trance, focused, dreaming. We have all been in different states. Some realms take us to different worlds. This isn’t something elusive at all. We have all experienced this, we know these different realms. It’s part of the human experience. We don’t always understand them, we wonder about their nature - but we know they’re very real.
When we took a look at Jung’s theories on the realms of consciousness - for Freud click here - things really started to click. Jung distinguishes three realms. Consciousness, the Personal Unconscious and the Collective Unconscious.
Consciousness is what we’re all most familiar with. It’s what we’re aware of, it’s the realm where we spend most of our time. It’s our day to day. It’s what you’re experiencing right now as you read this - at least I hope you are.
We’re all also pretty familiar with what Jung called the Personal Unconscious. It’s what we usually call our subconscious, everything that’s happening below the surface of our thinking. Our memories, our traumas, our secret desires are all part of our Personal Unconscious. It is tied in with who we are as people and what we have lived through.
The Collective Unconscious
The one that’s a little complicated and specific to Jung is the concept of the Collective Unconscious. Jung believes that during the evolution of human beings, we didn’t just physically evolve. He believes that there are clusters of meaning tied to symbols in our minds that are the same for every human being. He calls these concepts of the mind - these symbols - archetypes.
We are probably most familiar with this concept from dream dictionaries. If our subconscious mind was limited to the Personal Unconscious, with everything in our minds tied only to our personal experiences, then dream dictionaries wouldn’t make any sense - except maybe in small communities with many shared experiences and values. So when you had another dream where you were falling, flying, losing your teeth or guided by a wolf - to name but a few - those could be expressions of the Collective Unconscious that - according to Jung - have a similar meaning for all people.
Interesting for us is that these archetypes in the Collective Unconscious are also linked to mythology and fairy tales. Myths and fairy stories resonate with us because they are a very pure expression of archetypes. Compare a fairy tale to a story in a novel. In your novel, usually you get to know your main character. You get their name, you learn about their past, the way they dress, the way they move. Meanwhile if you read a fairy tale, often you don’t learn the names of the characters. There is a young man, a princess, a king, a witch. We don’t learn about their pasts, we don’t know much about what they look like. The main focus is on how they interact with other characters. We follow their actions and we never really learn much about their personalities. Fairy tales are a lot like dreams where often we seem to jump from place to place and everyone we see and meet is symbolic. In fact, Marie-Louise von Franz, one of Jung’s students dedicated many years of research and books to analyzing the archetypes and the psychological meaning of fairy tales.
With the theory out of the way, let’s get to the juicy bits. What does all of that have to do with our characters? As it turns out… a lot.
The story starts not long before Emma crashes her car. From that point on she is cut off from conscious reality as we normally experience it. The world she is in is very real, but it isn’t the world of Consciousness. You could say for all of season one, she is stuck in the realm of her Personal Unconscious. How do we know she isn’t also connected to the Collective Unconscious, then? If it is something that is inside of all of us?
We may all have the potential to connect with the Collective Unconscious, but that doesn’t mean we are actively doing it. Emma scoffs at the idea of her not being ready for fairy tales. How could you not be ready for a bunch of stories? Emma is jaded. She has lived her entire life on high alert. Food stolen from her plate, people around her always ready to take from her, sometimes in very visceral ways. Emma hasn’t had the luxury of ever standing still and looking inside. She has grown up in survival mode. Henry brings the fairy tales, but he and the book represent so much more than that. He brings the guidelines for psychological and spiritual development that are hidden in fairy tales and myths. On the symbolic level, Henry represents the Collective Unconscious. Henry has the heart of the truest believer. It requires belief to acknowledge there may be something out there that is bigger than our Self. Something that could help guide us. Most of used to believe as children, but as life happens that connection is usually cut, with a firm line drawn between what is real and what is not. It is Jefferson who tries to point out how it may be a good idea to start questioning that line.
Emma: History books are based on history.
Jefferson: And storybooks are based on what? Imagination. Where does that come from? It has to come from somewhere.
First the link with history is drawn, the stories in the first season are all influenced by Emma’s personal history. Imagination doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s our personal experiences that find their way into fictional stories. Everyone who has ever written anything knows it’s impossible to take yourself out of it. In a sense stories are history books as well. The question where imagination comes from is a deeper one. And he doesn’t stop there.
Jefferson: You know what the issue is with this world? Everyone wants some magical solution for their problem and everyone refuses to believe in magic.
This is again a reference to belief and to the dreams, signs, hunches, stories and the myths containing answers to our questions about life. As long as we are not taking them seriously, as long as we see them as nothing more than escapism we don’t allow for the magic to happen in our life. We need to allow for their meaning and wisdom to enter and impact us.
As this conversation happens, the Enchanted Forest and Storybrooke are still two separate worlds and it really gets to the heart of why Emma isn’t accepting the fairy tales are real - even after seeing so many magical things happen. It challenges her world view on the deepest of levels. The question we are being asked as an audience is if we are really that different from Emma?
Emma’s Personal Unconscious is still driving the stories at that point. She isn’t aware that she has stepped away from Consciousness, but curiously everything that happens to the Storybrooke characters relates to her own past. Henry is most likely reading the fairy tales from his book, so while the fairy tales are present, they are not integrated yet. Emma is resisting, even if the classic fairy tales are already being warped by her own experiences.
Finally at the end of the first season, we are clearly shown how True Love literally transcends realms. It’s not just poetry. It has meaning. Emma’s love for Henry makes that she recognizes and accepts that if she wants to be his mother, she will need to accept the guidance of the ancient stories to survive emotionally - and physically. Emma kisses Henry and the Personal Unconscious connects with the Collective Unconscious. The connection gives her the tools to start learning and healing because in the fairy tales and the myths lies the wisdom of the ages and she is now directly connecting her personal stories to the guidance of a greater force. Snow White & Prince Charming become her chosen mythological parents to guide her in this land.
As soon as the realms are connected, magic is brought to Storybrooke and the fairy tale world merges with our world. This is really the moment where Emma accepts her Hero’s journey using the archetypes in the stories she knows and the ones in the fairy tales being read to her, in order to work through her own past and present.
After Henry and Emma form their alliance, Regina is shown to go through a very lonely time. She is completely isolated. Regina represents Consciousness and she isn’t allowed to play yet as the Personal Unconscious and the Collective Unconscious explore their new connection. The brain damage Emma suffered is still preventing her from going back to Consciousness…
…even if Consciousness is really trying to tempt her. A lesser known interpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden and the Forbidden Fruit is that the fruit represents - you guessed it - Consciousness. The beginning of consciousness in the human race. It is something I want to get into in another post, because it would lead us too far astray, but the apple in the second episode is an invitation for Emma to wake up. Regina brings an entire basket of them. She really, really wants Emma to come back to Consciousness.
Just like Emma Regina is jaded. She’s lost too many people in her life and she is completely rooted in a harsh cold version of reality. She doesn’t want Henry to believe in fairy tales because she wants to minimize the shock that comes when you’re first confronted with the cruelty of life. She doesn’t have any hope for Emma and she wants to do everything to keep her son from becoming attached to a woman whom she is certain will never wake up. On top of that she is completely repressed. She’s a conservative Mayor in a small town who spent her entire life living up to other people’s expectations. She’s not only cut off from the Collective Unconsciousness, she’s also not in touch with her own Personal Consciousness. She doesn’t know who she really is without all these forces pulling at her.
When finally it is Henry who takes a bite from the apple turnover she gives to Emma, it turns out to be lethal. Henry is the Collective Unconscious directly connecting with Consciousness and it almost kills him. Henry is a little boy and you could say that this is literally him taking a bite of reality. The apple has two entirely different meanings depending on if Emma or Henry eats it. If Emma had eaten it, she would have come back to reality. And Regina only meant it for her. It wasn’t meant to kill. Now if Emma refuses to wake, it is Henry who will be confronted with death, with reality for the first time in a very harsh and painful way. Not only will he lose his birth mother, he will feel responsible for it for the rest of his life because without his intervention in her life, she might have lived. The psychological stakes for Henry in this moment are very high. Emma’s death would have killed him. So at this point if Emma doesn’t eat the the apple of Consciousness but dies instead, Henry will be forced to do so.
When Regina and Henry finally share True Love’s Kiss, it marks an incredible evolution in Regina and Henry. True Love transcends another realm, this time Consciousness and the Collective Unconscious do connect. Instead of the harsh reality check he would have gotten if Emma had died, Henry has had time to start seeing the gray in the black and the white. Emma fought like hell to stay alive for him and Regina decided for Henry’s sake to keep Emma from dying. Even if she didn’t believe Emma would wake up and even though there were consequences for her Henry was too young to understand. It is thanks to the fight both of his mothers put up that he didn’t get a rude awakening.
Where Emma and Henry’s kiss was immediately followed by magic coming to town, this new kiss is followed by Regina committing an act of faith. A willingness to believe that things might work out in spite of all the experiences to the contrary she’s had.
We see her helping Snow and Charming share a heart, something she has no idea will work. In her reality, this is most likely the moment where she arranges for her and Emma to share custody over Henry to save Emma’s life and keep her unlikely family together.
She isn’t even sure if the legal construction will work and she is now legally sharing her son with a woman in a vegetative state. She is willing to take a risk again and that’s something you simply don’t do if there isn’t a small part of you that has regained hope.
Where before Emma and Regina sporadically made contact, now they both have access to the Collective Unconscious. We’ve seen what that meant from Emma’s perspective as we’ve seen them grow closer, but it’s interesting to take a look at what that looked like for Regina. Now that she dares to hope again, she decides to look into different approaches for Emma’s treatment. When we first started research about comatose patients for the purpose of this blog, we found site after site with statements by doctors that communication with coma patients was simply not possible. Any responses were purely meaningless spasms. That is still the prevalent medical opinion. That would have been the same message Regina would have gotten. That Emma’s condition was pretty hopeless, that she wasn’t a person anymore. That she wasn’t really there.
However, it seemed like in the third episode, through Mary Margaret and David, they gave us a summary and foreshadowing of how Emma communicates. She responds to the stories and she reaches out to touch. After a long search, we finally found two psychologists who took a different approach to people in a coma. Amy and Arnold Mindell have been working with people in near-comatose states since the seventies. Their work is called process-oriented psychology. Curiously - and we only found this out much later - Arnold Mindell was a student of Marie-Louise von Franz - we mentioned her earlier - who applied Jungian psychology to fairy tales and who herself was a student of Jung.
The difference between their approach and the prevalent medical approach is that they believe comatose patients can communicate. The very assumption that someone in a different state of consciousness can’t communicate has as a result that people generally don’t even try. Research in the exact sciences has started to back up their claims when a few years ago scientist managed to prove comatose patients could answer yes/no questions. What makes it even more interesting for us is that they found out that people in a coma actually inhabit this symbolic world just like Emma. They have developed a technique where they mimic breathing, touch, imitate sounds, look for little signs and eye movements, twitches in order to start communicating.
So let’s check back in with Regina for a second. She may have connected with the Collective Unconscious, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t still skeptical at first. The difference is that she is willing to try this new method.
Coma work is slow. Some websites describe the coma worker just breathing in the same rhythm as the patient for 20 minutes before a connection is made, before a response is registered. It looks like the stake out may have been that very first session with someone teaching her how to start communicating with Emma. Regina isn’t the most patient person…
…and she’s trying really hard to give this thing a chance…
Despite her initial reservations, she doesn’t give up and continues to talk to Emma. It’s why the hand touches between them are maybe more important and more intimate than anything, because they’re doing something that most people don’t even believe is possible.
Depending on the state Emma is in - states of consciousness fluctuate and in some cases patients can sometimes even utter some words - Regina and Henry can start to find out more about the world Emma is in. Regina and Henry’s True Love’s Kiss opened Regina up to the Collective Unconscious - it was the start of the process where in the end she was able to completely go there with Emma. While she can’t literally see what Emma sees, she understands the significance of her world. She takes it seriously and she has some idea of what is going on.
When patients are coming out of their vegetative state and moving towards consciousness - like Emma is currently doing - part of the therapy is role playing their world with them based on their cues and responses.
That is what is happening in the wishverse. Regina wished to be in Emma’s world, so she is trying to do exactly that. Emma is seeing and hearing real Regina. If you watch the episode again with this in mind, it’s very clear. She seems amused, a little self-conscious, but she is not holding back. She is also completely convinced the danger in the wishverse is not real and she’s acting as such.
When Emma thanks Regina for coming to this crazy land to save her, she isn’t just talking about the wishverse, she is talking about the entire process Regina had to go through to get there. She had to fight the medical establishment, probably deal with people who didn’t believe what she was doing with Emma was real and significant. She had to invest her time and probably her money as well. Although the biggest sacrifice of all must have been that she opened up her heart again after losing Daniel in similar circumstances. She went ahead even though it brought back memories and she took the risk of caring again. Knowing that she is the kind of person who goes all in.
Emma is moving closer and closer to consciousness. Regina is slowly allowing herself to feel and connect with the personal unconscious. Henry is ready for his fairy tale family.
Time for true love to work its magic and transcend realms once more.
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