Letting Down Our Hair: Rapunzel, Care, and the Tangled Contract with the NHS

The story of Rapunzel has been passed down for centuries. From Persian epics to Italian folktales to the Grimm Brothers’ more familiar telling. But this isn’t just a bedtime story of damsels in distress and princes. It’s a symbolic tale of entrapment and longing, of psychic inheritance and separation. It’s about the architecture of captivity, and the complicated relief of release.

In today’s context, particularly for newly qualified clinical psychologists navigating the NHS, Rapunzel lands with a strange and familiar weight.

A Story Retold (But Not Sanitised)

A man steals lettuce/parsely from a sorceress’s garden for his pregnant wife’s craving. The cost? Their baby.

The girl, Rapunzel, is raised in a tower with no stairs or door. Her only connection to the world is her hair, impossibly long and used by the sorceress and later by a prince to climb up to her. She and the prince fall in love and Rapunzel unaware of the consequences of sex, gets pregnant. The sorceress notices her sweeping belly and in disappointment and fear of the future, severs Rapunzel’s hair. The sorceress continues in cold rage to push first the pregnant Rapunzel and then later the prince are out the tower window. Rapunzel is banished and the prince blinded.

Rapunzel and the prince each wander the desert, separated. Eventually, they find one another again. Now parents of twins and her tears restore his sight.

To me this is not only a story about love or rescue. It’s about agency and identity. About what is given and what is taken. It’s a story about maternal figures and institutions and what happens when people, over protected, get caught in their towers.

Hair as Bridge, Hair as Self

Hair in Rapunzel is not decorative, it is connective. From a Jungian perspective, it’s the lifeline between self and other, between inside and out. Her hair is what others climb to reach her, but also what she allows to be used. It is agency. It is identity.

Hair has long carried meaning. Across cultures and continents it is used as a marker of group identity and self-expression. Also cross cultures, braiding is a communal act: a transfer of tradition and status. Rapunzel’s hair, with her long braids unbound, becomes a threat when it connects her to something outside the sorceress’s control. And so, it is cut. What is symbolically severed is not just hair, but hope, freedom, desire.

How often are we told, explicitly or otherwise, that our longings are liabilities? That our creativity, connection, or love of the work must fit inside narrow systems?

This is the voice of the death mother archetype . The one who feeds, but imprisons. Who shelters, but stunts.

Institutions as the Death Mother

In Jungian terms, the sorceress is the Terrible Mother. The dark side of care. Protective, but to the point of paralysis. Nurturing, but conditional. The love is not generative; it’s possessive. It keeps Rapunzel safe, but small.

From a group analytic view, the sorceress might be read as the system itself. In this case, the NHS. A large group of people that raises, trains, and provides. But also one that demands, confines, and exhausts. Many psychologists begin training with a genuine desire to care. Yet as they enter the tower of NHS practice, that care is often co-opted by obligation.

Some stay, because they want to. Some stay, because they feel they must.

The Capacity to Care vs. The Experience of Obligation

At the heart of psychoanalytic work lies the question: Can I care? Not simply as a behavioural act, but as a psychic stance : a generative offering, freely given. This is worlds apart from must I care?, the internalised demand of the superego, the internal mother voice saying “You owe me.” The former is grounded in love, empathy, and containment; the latter, in guilt, compliance, and unconscious rage.

Clinical psychology training in the UK often begins in the realm of aspiration and capacity: the dream of helping others, the pursuit of justice, meaning, healing. But as training progresses, especially under systemic pressures (high workloads, burnout, performative compassion), many find themselves slipping into a defensive compliance. They care but out of demand to perform and an increasing sense of obligation.

This is precisely the psychic bind Rapunzel faces. In the tower, her needs are met: food, shelter, safety. But her life is not her own. Her song is permitted, but her body, her autonomy, are not. The longer she stays, the more her care (for the sorceress, for the prince) becomes a duty rather than a desire.

Rapunzel has many skills but self sufficiency is not amongst them. In the desert she must learn to survive and quickly. Now exposed to the elements and with twins to provide for, she cannot afford the luxury of ignoring nature’s consequences. Ideals meet reality.

The Dilemma: To Stay or Leave

The debate around newly qualified psychologists leaving the NHS for private practice is deeply polarising and deeply revealing.

On one side, there is a cry of moral debt: “If you’re funded by the NHS, you owe it your service.” A sacred and vital exchange. You were trained, now serve the kingdom.

On the other side, the lived realities: burnout, disillusionment, financial precarity. A system that no longer feels sustainable. A role that feels undefined. A desire not to abandon care, but to reclaim it.

And then there is the reality that stepping into private practice isn’t necessarily liberation. It can be lonely, ethically murky, and financially unstable. There’s no staircase there either, just different walls.

Group-analytic thinking asks us to widen the frame. This is not just about ethics or economics. It’s about roles — the grateful daughter, the silent sufferer, the rebellious child. It’s about scripts. Who wrote them? And who’s allowed to edit?

Whose Craving Was It?

There’s another character often left out of our identification: the mother who craved the lettuce.

What if, in our rush toward service, toward helping, toward “making it” we were also her? Hungry for something. For purpose, for belonging, for meaning. In psychoanalytic terms, the pursuit of training can carry a narcissistic investment. To be clear, not in the pejorative sense, but as a human desire to be seen and matter.

We trade years, money, geography, sometimes health for a place in this garden. And in that craving, we sometimes give away more than we know.

Noticing this doesn’t make us selfish. It makes us whole. We are not just Rapunzel, trapped and used. We are also the parent who bargained. We are also the witch. And maybe the prince, too.

Entitlement, Sacrifice, and the Shaky Promise of Training

Clinical psychology in the UK is almost uniquely privileged. A fully funded, salaried doctorate. But with that privilege comes confusion.

We are not doctors. We don’t typically diagnose. We’re not expert therapists, not in the way psychoanalysts or senior CBT supervisors might be. We don’t default to service leads. We’re trained to formulate from a position of evidence-base but how many of us still actively engage with research?

Quietly, many wonder: Would I want to see someone with my own level of therapeutic skill?

This is the discomfort of a fragmented identity. A protected title , but a diffuse role. A prestigious training but an uncertain offering. This dissonance, when unnamed, becomes disillusionment. And disillusionment, left unspoken, becomes exit.

What Part Are We Playing?

Rapunzel gives us an archetypal map but the danger is identifying with just one figure.

We are the daughter, yes. But we are also the mother. The witch. The prince. Even the garden.

The task is not to choose a part, but to integrate them. To ask:

• What part of me is singing?

• What part is bound?

• What part is cutting the rope?

• What part is waiting to be found?

Group analysis teaches us that we are not isolated. We are part of systems but also their carriers. We suffer them, shape them, and reproduce them.

Let Down the Hair, Not the Complexity

We are overdue a more conscious contract. Not enforced obligation. Not a romanticised calling. But a reckoning.

What does the clinical psychology training really offer? What does it ask of us? And what might a profession look like if it were rooted in adult reciprocity, not parental debt?

This is the shift from fusion to differentiation. From child to adult. From “I owe” to “I choose.”

Rapunzel’s hair was never just hair. It was history. Connection. A tether to what might be possible. When it was cut, something ended. But something began too.

Maybe, in letting go of what no longer serves, we make space for a different kind of song. One that’s not about proving worth but about living meaningfully, in relationship, in complexity.

So we ask, not just: What do I owe?

But: What kind of care do I long to give?

And more radically still: What kind of story do I want to live?