And the forgotten story
By Sophie Schoenfeld
All the stories have already been told.
They live beneath us—embedded in myth, in symbol, in the deeper structures of the psyche. We like to imagine ourselves as inventing the future, as if history were linear and not recursive. But more often, we are stepping into patterns we do not fully recognize.
The question is not what story we are writing.
But rather, which story we are inside of.
And more urgently, where we are within it.
—
In Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, the world is altered not by force, but by a mirror.
It is crafted by an evil magician—a mirror that reflects nothing as it is. Beauty becomes distorted. Truth is reduced. Meaning is bent out of shape. When the mirror shatters, its shards scatter across the world, lodging themselves in human eyes and hearts.
A boy named Kai is struck by one.
From that moment on, his perception changes. He becomes withdrawn, critical, distant. Where he once felt connection, he now sees defect. Where there was warmth, there is now distance. Eventually, he is taken by the Snow Queen to her ice palace, where he is given a task: to assemble fragments into a perfect form that will grant him freedom.
.
But the problem has no solution.
So he remains there, endlessly rearranging pieces, trying to extract meaning from something that cannot produce it.
He is not tortured.
He is occupied.
—
Carl Jung would not see this as a simple story. He would recognize it as archetypal.
Certain narratives appear across time because they reflect recurring patterns in the human psyche. They surface when something in the collective begins to shift. They orient us, if we know how to read them.
And when we do not, we live them.
We do not escape the story.
We become it.
Kai is not just a child under a spell. He is a mind cut off from feeling. What remains is analysis without integration, perception without grounding. Jung’s concept of individuation was never about isolation. It was about becoming whole through the integration of inner and outer life, through relationship, through encounter.
But in our current moment, individuation has been misread.
It has been flattened into independence.
Into self-definition without relation.
Into the idea that meaning can be generated alone.
—
This shift did not begin as a collapse.
Existential thinkers were responding to a different problem—a world shaped by rigid, inherited meanings that left little room for human freedom. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that “existence precedes essence,” insisting that meaning is not given, but created through choice and responsibility.
It was a demanding vision.
To be free was to be accountable. To act, to choose, to shape a life through engagement with the world.
But over time, that burden has softened into something else.
Meaning is no longer forged.
It is curated.
Adjusted.
Reframed.
Where responsibility once grounded freedom, now flexibility dissolves it. Where meaning required commitment, it now drifts across endless reinterpretation.
The result is not liberation.
It is unstable.
—
We now live among the shards.
Screens in our hands, fragments of information moving constantly, each one a version of reality that is not quite reality. Images are edited. Voices are replicated. Events are reshaped. A statement is made, then contradicted, then reframed again.
Public figures speak in ways that no longer require coherence. Truth bends easily. Contradictions no longer register in the same way.
At first, this produced outrage.
Then confusion.
Eventually, something else.
We begin to disengage.
—
This disengagement is not indifference.
It is an adaptation.
To remain fully attentive in a world where perception is constantly destabilized becomes exhausting. The mind protects itself. It lowers the intensity of response. It stops trying to resolve what cannot be resolved.
We scroll.
We absorb.
We move on.
And in doing so, we begin to resemble Kai—not because we lack intelligence, but because we are trying to orient ourselves inside a system built from fragments that do not form a cohesive unit.
—
The ice palace is not chaotic.
It is orderly.
There is no visible violence. Only stillness. Only structure. Only the quiet logic of a system that invites endless engagement.
Kai is given a task: arrange the pieces correctly, and you will be free.
But the pieces do not contain what is needed.
No arrangement completes the picture.
—
This is where we find ourselves.
We generate, refine, produce. Artificial intelligence extends this further—rearranging language, image, and sound into new forms. It can simulate coherence, but it does not restore context.
We are surrounded by output.
But output is not meaningful.
We continue.
We refine.
We search for resolution.
And something essential remains absent.
—
There is another distortion unfolding alongside this fragmentation.
The belief that identity is entirely self-made.
That a person exists as a closed system, defining themselves independently, accountable only to their own internal narrative. That to describe another—to name them—is a kind of violation.
We see it in small moments. A description is offered, and the response is immediate: That’s not how I want to be seen.
As if identity were constructed in isolation.
But no self has ever existed that way.
We are named before we understand ourselves.
We are shaped in the presence of others.
We are reflected, sometimes imperfectly, but often meaningfully.
Identity is not a fixed declaration.
It is something that develops across relationships, across time.
—
Jung understood the self as something that emerges through encounter. Not in isolation, but in relation. Without that relational field, identity begins to harden.
We define ourselves without friction. We revise endlessly. We curate.
But without reflection from others, the self does not deepen.
It narrows.
—
What breaks it is not insight.
It is Gerda.
Her commitment to rescue Kai leads her across distance, through uncertainty, into the frozen world that has taken him. Throughout the story, she calls out to him—again and again—“Kai.”
There is something important in this repetition.
The calling of his name is a form of remembering. A way of holding onto who he is beneath the distortion.
To be named is to be known.
To be remembered is to remain real.
Gerda does not solve a problem.
She restores a person.
And in doing so, the story points to something we are in danger of losing:
Meaning is not constructed alone.
It is formed in relation.
It exists between people.
—
There are still places where this has not disappeared.
Small, often overlooked spaces—community gardens, recovery groups, rooms where people sit together without documenting themselves—where experience is shared rather than reshaped. Where time is not optimized, but lived.
Thinkers like Byung-Chul Han have pointed to the loss of ritual as a central fracture in modern life—those shared structures that once anchored meaning. Sherry Turkle has described a culture in which we are “alone together,” physically near but psychologically separate.
Wherever people gather without mediation, something stabilizes.
Something real returns.
—
the story does not end in the castle.
It never has.
Because what breaks the system is not more intelligence, not optimized arrangements of fragments.
It is the return of feeling.
It is the decision not to remain alone inside the mirror.
Gerda does not defeat the Snow Queen through force. She moves toward Kai. She calls his name. She remembers him in a form he cannot remember himself.
And something shifts.
—
If we are inside this story—and it is difficult to argue that we are not—then the question is not how to improve the system.
It is to consciously step out of it. To remove the screen, this bewitched tool of distortion so we can see and feel each other again, as we are, flawed, fragile, magical.
Allowing experience to exist without reshaping it.
Remembering that meaning comes from shared life, not endless recombination.
—
In order to survive in this story, we must rebuild the conditions under which reality can be felt again.
Community is not optional.
It is necessary.
It is where meaning holds, where identity is reflected and adjusted through recognition. Where we are known by others, and reminded of ourselves.
—
The danger of this moment is not that we will become machines.
It is that we will forget how to be human with one another.
like Gerda, we must cross the distance, to call each other by our names,
so we can once again feel our hearts beating together.
Sophie Schoenfeld is a Los Angeles based therapist and writer exploring relationships, culture,
and the psychology of modern life.
