Healing the Adult Psyche: Finding Meaning and Wholeness Within Our Favorite Childhood Stories

This thesis explores how identifying archetypal themes of a favorite childhood story can aid in healing the adult psyche. Children, lacking the skill to verbally emote, use stories to process confusing, scary, or painful emotions. Adults may recall one story repeatedly requested in childhood, and using this story as a point of reference, may explore the story’s importance to their developing child psyche. Support for this work includes literature on children’s attachment to stories, selfobject needs as they relate to primary caregivers and story, and the process of psychological healing from a depth perspective, focusing on the polarities of the child/mother archetype and its relationship to developmental trauma. The author uses a heuristic approach and presents how psychological healing occurred as her favorite childhood story was utilized as a point of reference as she engaged in the exploration of archetypal themes that emerged from the reawakening of archaic wounds.