Using Hansel and Gretel to Nurture Creative Healing and Augment Psychic Realities
Chapter in Reading Children’s Fairytales: Inside the Gingerbread House (Routledge, 1st edition)
I am the author of the chapter “Using Hansel and Gretel to Nurture Creative Healing and Augment Psychic Realities” in Reading Children’s Fairytales: Inside the Gingerbread House, an edited collection published by Routledge.
It has been a particular pleasure to contribute to this volume, edited by a remarkable team with deep connections to Goldsmiths, University of London. The book is co-edited by Dr Mette Lindahl-Wise and Dr Harry Oulton, both PhD graduates of Goldsmiths’ Education department, alongside Professor Vicky Macleroy, now Emerita Professor following her retirement from Goldsmiths and still a hugely active and influential figure in the field, and Dr Emily Corbett, Head of the MA in Children’s Literature and a tireless champion of children’s and young adult literature.
Together, the editors have brought an exceptional group of leading and emerging researchers, practitioners, and creative writers into dialogue. The volume explores the enduring significance of Hansel and Gretel across children’s and young adult literature, art, and culture, using interdisciplinary approaches to examine how the tale has been translated, adapted, and reimagined across time and media. Chapters engage with picturebooks, graphic novels, poetry, young adult fiction, sculpture, and Hip-Hop, opening up rich possibilities for cross-pollination between critical, creative, and multimodal responses.
Collectively, the book challenges hierarchical and canonical approaches to fairy tales, celebrating multiple forms of knowledge and meaning-making and foregrounding culturally responsive, imaginative, and inclusive ways of reading and reworking this powerful story.
My chapter sits within this broader project by offering an autoethnographic, creative, and therapeutic engagement with Hansel and Gretel. It explores how the fairy tale can function as a living psychological text, capable of supporting creative healing and reflective inquiry.
Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, mindfulness, Internal Family Systems therapy, freewriting, and New Materialist research methods, the chapter documents a sustained creative engagement with the tale. I examine key symbolic motifs in Hansel and Gretel such as abandonment, deception, imprisonment, hunger, and escape, and show how these motifs can be used as prompts for meditation, movement, writing-in-role, scripting, and reflective writing.
Central to the chapter is the concept of “augmenting psychic reality”. In much the same way that augmented reality overlays digital information onto physical space, the fairy tale overlays symbolic meaning onto lived experience, enabling new ways of understanding memory, fear, trauma, and agency. Through this process, the chapter argues that fairy tales can help readers re-enter difficult experiences safely, generate distance from them, and ultimately reframe them.
The chapter is intentionally reflective and ethically situated. It includes a trigger warning and discusses the risks as well as the possibilities of using fairy tales for therapeutic and creative work. While rooted in my own experience, the chapter offers a carefully structured framework that educators, writers, and therapists can adapt for their own contexts.
Accessing the chapter
The final, typeset version of the chapter appears in Reading Children’s Fairytales: Inside the Gingerbread House and is copyrighted by Routledge.
I am able to share a draft PDF of the chapter, which contains the core argument and creative material, but does not reproduce the final published layout. You can read that draft here:
For the complete published version, please refer to the book:
Edited by Mette Lindahl-Wise, Harry Oulton, Vicky Macleroy, and Emily Corbett
Routledge
ISBN: 9781032907260
https://www.routledge.com/Reading-Childrens-Fairytales-Inside-the-Gingerbread-House/Lindahl-Wise-Oulton-Macleroy-Corbett/p/book/9781032907260