Freud and the Arthurian legend

A look at how a Freudian framework can be applied to the dreamlike nature of the Arthurian tales.

May 21, 2026

If you’re on this page, you probably know that I am the author of The SwithenArthurian book series, which is retelling the Arthurian legends across 25 novels (7 of which are out right now and I’m at work on the 8^th), with a focus on remaining absolutely faithful to the Arthurian legends as put down before the year 1485, so we can retain the medieval feel and logic without trying to fix it or adapt it for modern audiences.

So why is it important to remain faithful to the medieval legend and not try to update it, and on a larger level, what is the whole purpose and role that the Arthurian legends serve? To answer that question, we’re going to dip into the concepts presented by Freud, and more specifically a child psychologist working in the Freudian model, Bruno Bettelheim. 

A series of strange moral tales

We all think we know the Arthurian legend, but most of us are not familiar with what is actually in the medieval writings. If you’ve only seen movies or TV shows, you get the adventure and romance and the magic, but you don’t get the real texture of the stories, which present us with a bunch of strange adventures that bring up moral quandaries that the story invites us to work through.

For example, King Arthur has a child that is prophesized to be the destruction of his kingdom. He tries to have the child killed, but of course he survives and does end up killing Arthur at the very end. Lancelot is told his whole life that he is the perfect knight, but has to face that his love of Arthur’s wife Guinevere makes him imperfect, and costs him the ability to reach the Holy Grail. This other knight Balin is repeatedly told that if he continues on his path he will doom himself, but to turn back would be to renege on a promise, and he is supposed to keep his promises. For in large and small ways, the Arthurian legends present a bunch of moral quandaries and invite the reader to think through them and consider how best to act.

We also know that in the story, a key topic for the characters is how to act in the best and most moral way. They all aspire to chivalry, which is a moral code that inspires them to act with honor and gain worthiness through doing good and valiant deeds. And each year the Knights of the Round Table swear to uphold the Pentecostal Oath, which tells them to care for and protect women, the poor, the elderly and the church. The keep their promises and be work to protect others. So in the Arthurian legend, being a good person and acting in moral ways is central to the stories and something the characters themselves are always talking about.

Now, let’s consider the world in which these stories were invented and told. It was what we used to call the Dark Ages, from the year 500 to the early 1200s, when most people lived in small kingdoms and there was nearly constant warfare. They could not read and there was almost no cultural or literary output. So there’s no reason to think they were not intelligent, but they were not educated. They could not read or write, so they were not composing their thoughts, and they know very little about science or art and are living a very basic, grounded life. So into that you bring these stories that are about how to treat each other, how best to get along with others and how to act in a moral way toward your fellow human beings.

So let’s switch to Freud, and how Freud’s thought can help us understand the Arthurian legends and how they might have worked for these people in the middle ages.

An important hint from Freud

One important moment for me in understanding the figure of King Arthur himself—since on the page he is a fairly blank archetype and doesn’t have a lot of personality—and as a novelist I have to try to make him into a real human being with an understandable and relatable psychology.

So in his essay called “Family Romances,” Freud talks about that many children, as they age, start to believe that their actual parents are not their parents, but that they are the long-lost son or daughter of the king and queen. Now we have to remember that Freud is writing in Europe in the late 1800s, so thinking you’re the child of the king and queen is not completely out of the blue.

Freud says this happens because the child remembers the happy early days with his parents, but as they grow out of childhood, their parents want them to clean their room and do chores and are just generally annoying, so they start to want to return to these simpler days when they were coddled. And one way to imagine that is to have a daydream that you are actually the long-lost child of the king and queen, and they will soon realize it and whisk you away to the life of ease that you deserve.

To King Arthur, this actually happens. He actually does discover that his birth parents are the king and queen, and that he is destined to live a life much more exalted than he ever dreamed of. So Arthur is that archetype. He is a symbol of a dream existence, and he lives the life the rest of us dream of. And in the rest of the Arthurian legend he presides over a world that is much more dream-like than reality, where truly weird, symbolically-charged things happen all the time. And why is that? To think about it, let’s turn to a disciple of Freud, child Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim.

Fairy tales for adults

Bettelheim is best known for a book he wrote called The Uses of Enchantment, which deconstructs fairy tales within the framework established by Freud, including the idea that we all have our consciousness, which is where we manage our day-to-day lives, and we each have an unconscious, which is roiling with intense emotions and violent and sexual thoughts, so unruly that we have to keep it below our level of consciousness, even though, if left completely unchecked, those unruly thoughts and emotions can spill out into our conscious lives—often with disastrous results.

What Bettelheim says about fairy tales articulated some of the things I think about the Arthurian legend and how it works, only that the Arthurian legend deals in adult matters such as violence and sexuality more directly than we find in fairy tales. Even J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, in the introduction to his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, refers to Arthurian romances as “fairy tales for adults.”

So let’s see what Bettelheim says.

“Myths and fairy tales both answer the eternal questions: What is the world really like? How am I to live my life in it? How can I truly be myself?… Myths and fairy tales speak to us in the language of symbols representing unconscious content. Their appeal is simultaneously to our conscious and unconscious mind… In the tales’ content, inner psychological phenomena are given body and symbolic form.”

Fairy tales let us work through unconscious thoughts and feelings

Bettelheim says that fairy tales allow kids to bring up their most unruly feelings, like jealousy at siblings and anger at their parents, and process those feelings in a harmless and positive way. The Arthurian legend also does this, but for adult feelings like violence, sexual desire, love, hate, jealousy, but with an intensity suitable to adults, in stories where people actually do get killed, actually do kill others, and do get involved in sexual situations. It deals in very primal emotions, but it lets people explore those situations in a safe setting, by just hearing about how others deal with those situations and thinking about how they themselves would deal with them.

“In order to master the psychological problems of growing up… a child needs to understand what’s going on with his conscious self so he can also cope with what goes on in his unconscious. He can achieve this… by becoming familiar with it through spinning out daydreams… By doing this, the child fits unconscious content into conscious fantasies, which then enable him to deal with that content… When unconscious material is to some degree permitted to come to awareness and worked through in imagination, its potential for causing harm—to ourselves and others—is much reduced.”

It is crucial that the stories be unrealistic

Something I found really interesting Bettelheim says about fairy tales is that it is very important that they not be realistic. The reason is that if they were realistic, we would be thinking rational thoughts, like “How did they get from here to there?” and “How long would it take for them all to travel that far?” whereas the story being unrealistic from the starts shuts that logical part of our brain down, and launches the story right up to the level of the symbolic, where we can process the meaning and emotions brought up by the story in a pure state, without trying to make sense of them.

“The unrealistic nature of these tales… is an important device, because it makes obvious that the fairy tales’ concern is not useful information about the external world, but the inner processes taking place in an individual.”

The hero doesn’t have to win

Bettelheim says that the story doesn’t have to exactly mirror what should be done in the real world, specifically, that the hero doesn’t always have to do the right thing, and the hero doesn’t have to always win. He says that’s what’s most important is that the child identifies with the hero’s wish to be good, and so they will want to be like the hero, and strive to be good. Compare this to some of our current entertainments, in which our heroes do and say everything perfect, and are boring and forgettable, to the Arthurian legend, in which our characters make awful mistakes and do horrible things, and yet are unforgettable.

“It is not the fact that virtue wins out at the end which promotes morality, but that the hero is most attractive to the child, who identifies with the hero in all his struggles.”

Apply it to the Arthurian legend

So I think that the Arthurian legends function by the same rules as fairy tales in these respects. These stories resonate with meaning and encourage people to bring up and think through moral issues, like how should they act toward their neighbor? How should men act toward women? How should people aspire to act? In the Arthurian legend, it says with honor and worthiness, to treat women well and also to protect and care for the poor and elderly.

The Arthurian stories are definitely unrealistic, so listeners would stop thinking of what they mean in a practical way and understand that they are operating on the level of the symbolic. They understand that Arthur is not a specific man, but a figure that represents everyone, presiding over a dream world in which very real—and very adult—emotions play out and can be processed in a harmless way. And they can see that like them, these characters make bad mistakes, but they face the consequences of them and they try to act better and be decent people in the long run.

So in that way the concepts of Freud and the writing of Bruno Bettelheim on fairy tales can offer us a way to understand what might have been the purpose and intent of the Arthurian legends.