By Walter Schönau
Professor Emeritus, German Literary History
University of Groningen
Abstract:
Hermann Hesse’s well-known fairy tale Iris is interpreted psychoanalytically within the framework of his lifelong practice of ‘conjectural autobiography’. Hesse often merged fact and fiction to dramatize his inner crises, his troubled marriage, and his desperate attempts at self-realization. In Iris, the protagonist Anselm follows Hesse’s familiar triadic pattern of childhood harmony, alienation, and apparent reconciliation; however the conclusion suggests not maturity but a symbolic regression into the maternal womb. In this sense, Iris may be read as an ‘anti-fairy tale’: rather than affirming life, it idealizes mystical dissolution. Hesse’s magnetic appeal may, at least in part, lie in his ability to transform unconscious desires for retreat and self-annihilation into grandiose visions that offer irresistible, yet ultimately empty, promises of spiritual fulfillment.
Keywords:
Hermann Hesse, fairy tales, (Neo-)Romanticism, psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung
To cite as: Schönau, W., 2025, “Hesse’s Grandiose Conjectural Autobiographies: On the Fairy Tale Iris,” PsyArt 29.2, pp. 146-168.