• Sim-seong Yeon-gu
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.161-200
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• 2023

The fairy tale 'The King's Ass's Ears' is a simple story about a king and a barber. The king's 'Ass's ears' is discovered by the barber, who becomes sick due to his inability to reveal the secret. He eventually confesses the secret in a deep pit and covers it with soil, but a reed grows in that spot and reveals the secret when it sways in the wind. This fairy tale is registered in Stith Thompson's narrative type AT 782 as 'King Midas and His Ass's Ears', corresponding to a well-known story of King Gyeongmun in Korea, as it is published in elementary textbooks. When something becomes conscious, its automatic mechanical tendency leads to obsolete and rigid. To avoid rigidity in our conscious life, we need continuous renewal via contact with the flow of mental events in our unconscious. From the aspect of analytical psychology, the King's 'Ass's ears' enables irrational contact with the fundamental emotions lost in the flow of life. The barber symbolizes spiritual transformation, and the reed swaying in the wind symbolizes the revelation of secretive knowledge associated with the divine. The king can hear the sound of all creation and become one with it, which was the will of the divine. The Self, as the psychic totality of an individual and paradoxically also represents the regulating center of the collective unconscious, continually seeks to merge and transform with the lost primal layer of humanity, which has now become distant and discarded due to the development of human consciousness.