I’m excited to present the second episode in our series on the forest in fiction!

Given our theme, I felt there had to be an episode on fairy tales, and I wanted to pick up a thread from my episode with fairy-tale specialist Maria Tatar on the Wolf in the Woods: the connection made by psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim between the “dark woods” of fairy tales and the unconscious.

I was lucky enough to speak to Ellen Handler Spitz, the renowned specialist of psychology and the arts, also a Senior Lecturer in the Humanities program at Yale, who made a wonderful suggestion – rather than discuss the fairy tales in their original form, she proposed that we talk about Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical Into the Woods, which, she told me, was a “masterpiece of psychological wisdom.”

And, indeed, it is! If you haven’t yet seen it, I recommend you do so before listening to this episode. You can watch a terrific production by Arc Stages in Pleasantville, New York here. You can also rent the original Broadway production. As I explain in the episode, I don’t recommend watching the Hollywood film in the place of a stage production, though you may want to watch it in addition for some of the great performances (Johnny Depp is de rigueur as the wolf).