Curing the monster Some images of and considerations - Prof. Dr ...

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flying horse due to its enormous power and its ability to fly attacks against one's
enemies (e.g. McCaffrey 1981; Vance 1986). The degeneration of the dragon in
science fiction stories in comparison to the ancient mythological figure seems to
parallel the discrepancy between the horses of the horsemen of the apocalypse
and brewery horses to quite an extent; like horses dragons are tamed and
breeded; the passion is gone.
The dragon has also become an increasingly prominent figure in children books.
Although in some cases (e.g. Lindgren 1986) the dragon seems to keep his magic
notion, it predominantly seems to be turned into a pet or a friend for the lonely
child. Quite often the dragon is trivialized into a child-like little creature who either
is full of inferiority feelings himself (Korschunow 1984; Schmögner 1975) or
becomes an ally against the child's parents or his comrades (Kent 1986; Nerev
1986). As such the dragon occasionally has become a substitute for the split off
double which, as, for example, in R. L. Stevenson's 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde', was a
well-known pattern in the fictions and novels at the turn of the last century (cf. Rank
1971, McWhinney 1987). The dragon in recent children books thus sometimes
carries the notion of the Jungian shadow, the unaccepted split off part of oneself
which has to be integrated during the process of further maturation (Jung et al.
1986: 118 f.; Neumann 1984: 69 ff.). However, from my own limited impression of
children's books about dragons I hesitate to confirm their positive educational
function (cf. Burkolter-Trachsel 1981: 168); these books rather often seem to
favour their authors' point of view, as if the fascinating, frightening, magic part of
reality did not exist. To quite an extent these books appear to me to be
trivializations of the numinous, i.e. they seem to reconfirm a metamyth that there is
nothing beyond the rational and the obvious, that it all can be handled (cf. Ingersoll,
Adams 1986: 362) and that not only "a management text" but also management
itself "is no place for fairy tales" (cf. the advertisement for a recent book on
management by South-Western using the dragon image).
Figure 5: Academy of Management Journal 29, 1986: 876
4. The dragon as a symbol for corporate identity: Avantgarde or
arrieregarde?