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The story of an unrequited love, of someone more willing to give up her lover and her own life than to give up loving. A love that is greater than the desire for fulfillment, larger than life and death. Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid is a thought-provoking tale, for it tells us about those unhappy lovers who want to give themselves to someone who can not accept the gift of their life. The theologian and psychoanalyst gradually decrypts Andersen's language and symbolism with the methods of depth psychology. He comes to a new interpretation of this famous fairy tale, which also contains autobiographical elements of the author Hans Christian Andersen. Nowhere else but in his diaries Andersen himself speaks so directly, not anywhere else he sets out to describe - even if symbolically veiled - his most intimate feelings, his yearning for love and his loneliness.