When assessing the psychoanalytic perspective of fairy tales today, one can easily identify the in-depth association between the main character's persona and what that portrayal represents in real life. According to Bettelheim, " more can be learned from them about the inner problems of human beings, and of the right solutions to their predicaments in any society, than from any other type of story within a child's comprehension" (Bettelheim, 5). For instance, in the Grimm Brother's fairy tale, "Briar Rose," one can visualize the implications within the story in regards to how they relate to reality. Such as, the common trend of a young girl's most perfect dream of love and happiness ever after, in which psychoanalysts instill a decidedly lopsided interpretation of how life truly is in hopes to gain a correlation between the beauty and virtue as the vital aspect of a women's existence. Though psychoanalysts can interpret "Briar Rose" in several different ways, I perceive the folk tale as "a females right of passage" or "coming of age". "Briar Rose" metaphorically illustrates both sexual maturity and the urgent need for marriage between one's head and heart, as well as loss and recovery of one's soul. .
The folk tale begins when Briar Rose is placed under a curse that foretells she will prick her finger on her fifteenth birthday and fall dead. On the day of her birthday, Briar Rose began exploring the unused rooms of the castle until she discovered a scared, locked room at the top of stairs inside the tower in which there was an old woman turning a spinning wheel. In attempting to take this spinning wheel from the old woman Briar Rose pricks her finger and falls into a deep sleep along with the rest of the kingdom, fulfilling the curse placed upon her by the uninvited thirteenth fairy at her christening. However, another fairy reworked the curse, sentencing that death be a hundred years sleep.
