Cinderella, for example, is not only a children's story, but an adult source of imaginal figures that we carry around with us as an underground stream that flows into the imaginary social world described by Caughey. Cinderella is, in this view, a part of our psyche, it is a story with motifs and themes that we are living in and living out in everyday life. The witches, giants, and dragons of fairy tales are analogues of the mythic creatures populate our own psyches. Each of us have some combination or other of imaginal witches, giants, dragons, and dwarves within us.
Fairy tales reflect the mythic substrata of our own lives.
The stories we live today, our stories as lawyers, are related to the stories and fairy tales we heard as children. We are living out and living with the images and theme motifs of Cinderella or living in opposition to the story and the images that it has left with us. The themes and subplots for the life we live as adults are consciously and unconsciously derived from the stories we have grown up with as children, the stories we have concocted for ourselves as adults, but these stories are always mediated by the stories we no longer tell, the stories of the imaginal figures left us from fairy tales and myths. There is myth in our stories. When we are telling, talking, tattling, teaching, we come closer to myth, we become mythmakers.