A psychoanalytic case study of Snow White's marital depression

¶ … White

Psychoanalytic Creative Case Study

Age: Eighteen (approximate age of entering adulthood from adolescence in her society)

Gender: Female

Ethnicity: Judging by the style of the cottages in the wood where she flees, German.

Race: Caucasian

Living situation: Snow White's father and mother are deceased. She lived with her stepmother and a magic mirror until she came of age. When it was revealed that she was the "fairest of them all," she was evicted from her home. She acted as housekeeper for seven men at their 'bachelor pad' until she left their cottage to marry Prince Charming.

Martial status: Recently married

Significant other: Prince Charming

Theoretical basis: Psychoanalysis

Snow White has a very unstable ego and rarely allows the impulses of her id, including anger to manifest themselves. Her libido has been repressed by virtue of pleasing others. She has received little validation from loving parental figures. Her parents died when she was very young and never gave her a clear sense of autonomy, identity, and self-worth. She looks to others to define her purpose in life, as manifest in her earlier fixation on her prince coming and making her life perfect. The displacement of her problems with her stepmother was projected onto the figure of a perfect prince, her anger sublimated into a fantasy marriage. She defines her personal sense of worth in terms of how others see her, especially men, and is prone to idealize male figures. This makes her extremely vulnerable, especially around men, given that her main sense of identity has come from her appearance or her housekeeping duties. Her lack of positive female role models and relationships makes it difficult to relate to women in friendly, non-sexual and uncompetitive ways.

Unconsciously, Snow White tries to find acceptance by making herself indispensable by acting as a housekeeper for the dwarfs. A desire to lower her status as a protective mechanism, since her beauty caused her stepmother to reject her, may also be evident in her behavior. Snow White shows some masochistic tendencies, as when she makes herself vulnerable to the dwarves, throwing her body on their beds and falling asleep, or eating the witch's apple.

Snow White has a low sense of self-efficacy. She dreams of a prince making her life better, not of making her life better through her own initiative She does not leave her cruel stepmother's home, rather she waits until she is literally forced out in a life or death situation, even though she was being abused and used as a scullery maid. This behavior may also tie into her strong superego as a character -- she does not openly disobey her stepmother, ever, and works hard to earn her keep for the dwarves. However, her superego's strength is inconsistent -- she breaks into a home rather than takes refuge somewhere else, and allows herself to eat an apple from a stranger.

Snow White is the subject of her stepmother's projections -- all of the woman's fears about aging and her loss of beauty are projected onto the girl, and the woman forms a fixation on Snow White. However, the only mother Snow White has ever known is this cruel one -- so she responds with passivity rather than outright aggression. Her only defense is through becoming more feminine -- working harder and dreaming of the price who will escape and enact the vengeance she really feels upon this wicked stepmother. Her sublimated kindness could be her way of resolving her Electra Complex: girls are supposed to resent their mothers for not giving them penises, and try to 'have' their father's penis by 'becoming' like their mothers. By becoming more feminine than her powerful mother-figure, Snow White hopes to gain a father figure in the form of a prince and gain power through beauty rather than magic like her stepmother.

Unfortunately, even after being whisked away by the prince, things are not perfect for Snow White. She is once again unable to articulate her own needs, and does not even have an opportunity to work hard to secure her self-esteem as she did working at her stepmother's palace or at the dwarves' home. It is difficult for Snow White to understand this and she denies feeling any sense of deep sense of personal discontent before her marriage. Feeling unhappy was not part of her positive persona, as being cheerful and future-focused has been the primary defense mechanism that she has used to deal with emotional difficulties. Snow White has also not dealt with her past traumas, insisting she does not blame her stepmother for trying to kill her -- twice -- or mind that she had to work so hard, in unpaid servitude in the dwarves' home. In fact, she swears that she only remembers sleeping, not the attempt on her life with the poisoned apple, and has repressed most unhappy memories of her childhood.

Final Analysis: Although she is a young woman, Snow White still seems mired in the fourth stage of Erikson's psychosocial development, and failed to have gained a sense of competence in her worth as a human being, outside of others' estimation of her attractiveness and her ability to engage in feminine care-giving (Wagner 2009, p.1).