Wishfulfillment and Symbolism in Fairy Tales/Chapter IV

by Franz Ricklin

CHAPTER IV

Symbolism

In order to gain an insight into the meaning of the symbols of fairy tales we must first learn something of their origin.

A symbol is a sign, a short cut for something complex. When I see a post-horn near the name of a station on a railway timetable, it is clear to me that the station has postal connections with places which are not on the line.

The "Captain of Köpenik," a shoemaker and habitual criminal, insured himself the unconditional obedience of a number of Prussian soldiers in the robbery of the city bank, by wearing a captain's uniform, because the wearing of a uniform, and especially an officer's uniform, is a sign for a great mass of things and ideas, which it is not necessary to recount.

The symbol, however, has still more that is peculiar to it. Why does the sign of the post-horn and nothing else, represent on the time-table the idea of postal connections and the associated ideas. The post-horn is something that originally belonged to the post. Although it is not a necessary part of it, it was earlier one of the most concrete signs of it, less for the eye than for the ear. So we have two new sources of the symbol. That the sign chosen for the symbol has a significance in an inner or outer associative relationship and is concrete. Further it is so much the more appropriate as history and development are included in it, whereby it is, however, not without variations of significance. The times with us have pretty well gone by when the postillion lustily blew his horn. The horn as a sign, however, has remained, on the time-table, in the army, as the sign of a field post, and still in many other places.

With the idea of symbol there is usually associated something full of mystery. Symbols are often used as signs of recognition for secret societies, for example, the signs of the Free Masons. The secrecy also lays in the fact that only the initiated know the significance of the symbols. That, for example, was the case with the runic writing which only certain people could read; that also gives the ceremonials of the church their magical effects on the susceptible soul. Already the development and the associated changes of meaning make it impossible that any but the initiated should be able to understand the significance of the symbols.

Because the symbol is only a sign, only a part of the original significance, so it is, that in its further development, it gradually becomes the sign for different things: The post-horn has significance according to the place, the surroundings, in the psychological sense, according to the various associations bound up with it. Mail stage-coach connections, when it is by the name of a station on the time-table, letter mail connections when on a letter box. In out of the way mountain villages it signifies still much more, and on the sleeve of a uniform, again something different.

Through this summation of meanings it comes that the sign is a condensation and an accumulation of all of these single ideas concealed within it. The characteristic of, for example, the dream symbol, is the thousand threads of association that run together (the dream of the portal). It results, at the same time, in an ambiguity of symbols. The double meanings can come out in all possible ways. Whoever is not initiated and does not know all the directions of the symbol, interprets it falsely or only according to his own idea. The bible, for example, has both the advantage and the disadvantage of containing many symbols which may be interpreted in the most varied ways.

The interpretation of the dream symbol has to get its value on the same grounds as it has been given by Freud on scientific foundations, so that we recognize the structure of the symbol and everyone who cares to can learn this science.

The ambiguity of the symbols has the disadvantage that thinking in symbols, that is resorted to in dreams and in many psychoses, especially in dementia precox, here often to an unbelievable extent, is much less clear, defined and logical than is thought just in sharp, circumscribed ideas having to the greatest extent possible only one meaning. In this special sense one is quite right, with Bleuler,^[1] Jung,^[2] and Pelletier,^[3] in designating thinking in symbols as of less value, as inferior to logical thinking.

And yet what difficulties we have in our own language not to think in symbols! Is not nearly every word a symbol! All abstract ideas must be expressed by words, which at first, and often yet, have a concrete significance (for example, wägen, wiegen, erwägen, gewogen; or gebildet = instructus and gebildet = accomplished—in the sense in which it is used by Goethe = geformt (formed), for example, ein wohlgebildeter Jüngling = a well formed youth.) And what changes in meaning have they not already gone through.^[4] The language of poetry prefers to work with words of ambiguous sense in order to give both meanings at the same time. It is not difficult to bring examples of symbols which unite within themselves, partly or wholly, these several qualities.

Letters are symbols, as their development clearly shows. Our mimic and gestures are in great part symbolic.^[5] A geographical chart is a symbol. The concrete symbols for abstracts are noteworthy. The eye of God (omniscience), the scales (justice), the cross (Christendom; compare the Vision of Constantine: "in hoc signo vinces"); the color symbols: black = mourning; in the Catholic church violet is the mourning color; red = love, socialism, revolution; the black and red international; the military symbolism (power, intimidation, differences of authority, belonging to various countries); the anchor of hope, the symbolism of coats of arms and standards; one makes a present of something as a "sign of love"; the "fire of love," the pain of separation. The language likes to employ, besides those just named, also condensed symbols. One hopes, for example, to feather one's nest. In pictures of the middle ages and among such old culture folks, so long as their art stood at a more archaic stage (to stand on a step—stufe—is again a symbol of speech) the relative authority is expressed in the persons represented by differences in size, or among kings and gods by a figurative representation of their attributes. (We find a beautiful example in an "Adoration" by Dürer in the old Pinakothek in Munich.)

Still we must hasten over these trains of thought in order to utilize what has been learned for our fairy tale symbolisms.

Here two symbolic series unite and often overlap; one develops from the aspects of magic, mythology, and religion, the other is the symbolism of dreams and of psychopathology. It is true they originate from the same spring, the human psyche.

In mythology the construction of symbols comes about in a different manner. First through personification. The forces that influence mankind are personified, natural phenomena and inexplicable inner experiences (dreams, nightmare). In place of the real, active forces, anthropomorphic beings are substituted. Whether these are to be sought in the departed souls, or whether they have another indefinite or later defined origin, whether they are incarnated in natural phenomena or are later thought of as controlling certain natural phenomena, is beside the point. There are very many stages in this aspect which sometimes exist together and sometimes follow one another. How far the analysis of such structures, such symbolic forms, which, originally simple personifications of a definite principle, have come to form fully built up personalities, may take us, is shown, for example, by the history of the devil.^[6]

A new factor is now added to the symbol. The personified or unpersonified forces display some power, some effect. This effect becomes now transferred on its symbol, on its figurative representation, which belongs in its province, and so the symbol itself receives, besides its already named characteristics, a certain force and effect, which originally belonged to the whole which in part is represented by the symbol.^[7] For this reason the devil can do nothing as soon as a place is protected by a cross or the sign of the cross. On the same grounds the pictures of the saints played such an important role with the Russians in the Japanese war and naturally also elsewhere. So in the old cults where the symbol of the gods of fertility, not simply their picture but the part, part of the whole, which represented concretely the fruitfulness, the phallus, was carried around in order to bring fertility to the fields, and still more, it was with the same object that young maidens were struck naked with a branch, a living branch, as a still more remote symbol, so that through this symbolic action the same object would be attained.

The cults themselves have also undergone a process of symbolization. Instead of human sacrifices, sacrifices of animals came gradually to be offered, then the animal was offered in some sort of imitation (formed of bread for example). The Chinese, for example, began to offer their divinities, instead of metal coins, papers representing them. The archives of ethnology are filled with examples, as the rational customs represent in great part remains of a strong symbolic cult.

Animals, of which a great number are and were sacred, belong to the symbols, which instead of a personified power of nature have become demons, god heads (the owls of Athens, the mountain serpents in the Erechtheion).

In the mythological tales and customs particular animals may assume a quite special symbolic significance, for example, a special sexual significance. At the feast of Dionysus, in which also fertility was sought, young male animals were offered up by preference. Zeus ravished Europa as a bull; Leda as a male swan. He impregnated Danae as a golden shower by the intervention of a symbolism which while not animal was clearly sexual.

Animals as representatives of sexual power are suitable as symbols insofar as that even in our speech and our general attitude the life-preserving principle is considered as the animal in man.

We are now arrived at a point where we can understand the symbolism of fairy tales, especially the sexual symbolism, so far as it springs from mythology and magic.

We must now approach it from the other side, the psychological and the psychopathological.

Freud explains in his "Traumdeutung" that the so-called dream-work is an effort towards condensation, in view of the representation of abstract things appropriate in a given scene, by the substitution of representable (concrete) things; that similarity, agreement, likeness, are represented in the dream in the same way by bringing them together into a unity. Are not these moments which necessarily lead to symbolic construction? Then there is further the repression which compels the dream to indicate certain things in other forms, in a symbolism, which however, is only understandable to the initiated and which is hidden from the conscious ego. So much for the construction of symbols in the dream.

The following dream fragment will make us familiar with the symbolism employed therein, which in this case disguises a strong sexual theme.

The bridegroom dreamt. He was in the so-called long street of the town in which he had passed the years of his youth. A forest fire had broken out. He hastened with a certain anguish. Someone is near him whom he does not see. He knows, however, that it is his brother who played a part in the fire department of their native city and indeed in the company which guarded the place. The dreamer noticed that he himself was not in uniform although he should have worn one. He is in civilians clothes and thinks: so goes it. Instead of riding breeches (he himself has been mounted in the military) he wears short English breeches. Instead of a saber he carries a somewhat different instrument, a sort of riding-whip which reminds one, however, more of a cowhide. This he must carry raised in a certain way before him; "so must the saber be carried according to rule" he thought in the dream. With that he hastened in the direction of the burning woods: he passed a house from which dismal cries sounded. There was probably the origin of the fire it seemed to him in the dream.

Whoever has familiarized himself with dream analysis will easily find the sexual symbolism in this dream.

The long street is a passage in the female genitals. In the same sense there are, for example, slanting, upward opening, roof windows which, through an obstruction are with difficulty accessible (hymen). In a similar dream there came down the steep stairs small, naked, smooth headed boys from the school, homunculi, who signified new-born children, who later would manifestly study like papa!

The stove pipe was also often dreamt of in the same way. Out of it came a rose-red serpent, which was very long. Compare the Russian fairy tale of "The Little Bear," that will be mentioned in a later chapter. This last dream picture is from a young mother, to whom the time until the arrival of the child seems very long. The serpent is used, as we will see later, as a symbol for the male organ and through which fruit is brought forth; the long time is represented by the length of the serpent. The popular saying is: "At Frau N.'s the oven has fallen down;" that means that Frau N. has given birth.

The portal in the earlier related dream and the mouth in one to be related later belong to dream symbols to be similarly interpreted.

In the forest fire there are two components. Forest has here the same sexual significance as the nymph's forest in Freud,^[8] it is the forest on the so-called mons veneris of women and belongs with it in the neighborhood of the long passage.

When there is burning in a dream usually the fire of love burns; in the dream, in the usage of language, in figurative representation (the heart of Jesus is, in the church symbolism, almost always represented with a flame, as the symbol of love, bursting forth from it) fire is closely connected with love; similarly in mythology.

In the special case this significance is quite transparent. The brother appears as a fireman. The brother represents therefore the family of the dreamer, which, living in the city does not agree with his marriage, and how this will prevent the fire. With this, is also connected, that the dreamer will not marry in the uniform of the rigid, confessionally disposed brother (family) but thinks, it makes no difference, one can marry civilly. He appears from now in riding costume. Just as we must translate the fire of the fire dream into love, so riding, signifies empirically, usually something sexual.

Women often dream in similar connection of horses which prance immediately before them and threaten to crush them.

The further analysis of the trousers will be passed over at this point.

The dreamer carries a sort of saber, not as usual but in a position and direction as becomes the erect phallus. In the place of the saber succeeds a sort of cow-hide. In the swiss dialect Hagenschwanz is the name for it (Hagen from Hägi = bull; Schwanz is a military and also a common designation of the phallus). The Hagenschwanz is made from the phallus of the bull and that is how it gets its name. On account of its elasticity it is used in place of a whip by cattle drivers and is, besides, a much feared means of punishment. It appears in this role in common parlance. When besides in the dream the saber is used to fight it has to do usually with a sexual conflict, also besides that the saber for explanation is transformed into a Hagenschwanz and must be carried in place of an erect phallus (the saber is stuck in the sheath!). So now the dreamer hastens in the direction of the burning woods.

The cry from the house is exactly like that which a short time before the dreamer heard in a zoological garden as he was walking by the animal cages with his bride. It came from a pair of pumas that were just about to copulate.

Only through these symbolisms was it possible to concentrate the whole dream, which was cut into so many trains of thought, into one picture. The analysis shows us repeatedly how many symbol constructing elements exist in the dream. The strong erotic of the dream is, however, only clear to the initiated. We see here horse, bull, saber, cow-hide, etc., namely animals and objects, the latter brought into relation by derivation or similarity with the symbolic representation employed in the indication of symbols of man as a sexual being.

We find similar material, for example, in a work of Jung.^[9]

Hysteria has innumerable symbolic representations that through special mechanisms and memories are always again being awakened and still remain hidden to consciousness. Hysterical attacks are often in their essential parts abridged, symbolic representations, also the hysterical physical symptoms and conduct.

A short hysteria analysis will follow in a few pages.^[10]

Dementia præcox, which represents the commonest mental disease, is in a high degree manifested in symbolic thinking^[11] and the same thing is seen in other psychoses.^[12]

Paradigms are mentioned under the wish structures of dementia præcox and we will return to others in examples of fairy tales.

Notes

1. Bleuler, "Freudsche Mechanismen in der Symptomatologie von Psychosen," Psych.-neurol. Wochenschrift, 1906, No. 35 and 36.
2. Jung, "Ueber die Psychologie der Dementia praecox." Halle a. S., Marhold, 1907. See translation in Monograph Series, No. 3.
3. Madeleine Pelletier, " L'association des idées dans la manie aigue et dans la débilité mentale." Thèse de Paris, 1903.
4. I refer, for example, to Hermann Paul, "Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte," III Aufl., Halle a. S., Max Niemeyer, 1898. The change in meaning can certainly cause a definite transfer so that the original meaning no longer serves at present. For instance the word "elend" in the middle and new high german.
5. Compare Ernst Jentsch, "Ueber einige merkwürdige mimische Bewegungen der Hand," Zentralbl. für Nervenheilk. u. Psychiatrie, XXVII Jahrg., 15, VIII.
6. Gustav Roskoff, "Geschichte des Teufels." Leipzig, Brockhaus, 1869.
7. Compare here the contribution of Prof. S. Singer-Bern: Die Wirksamkeit der Besegnungen. "Schweiz. Archiv. für Volkskunde," Jahrg. I, 1897, p. 102.
8. "Bruchstücke einer Hysterieanalyse," Monatsschr. für Psychiatrie und Neurologie, Bd. XVIII, 1905, Heft 4 and 5.
9. "Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien," VIII Beitrag, Journal f. Psychologie und Neurologie, Bd. VIII, 1906, Leipzig, J. A. Barth.
10. In earlier works I have given examples of such symbolism. Compare "Diagnostische Assoziationsstudien," VII Beitrag, and Psychiatrisch-neurologische Wochenschrift, 1905, No. 46.
11. Compare Jung, "Ueber die Psychologie der Dementia praecox." Halle a. S., Marhold, 1907. See (this series).
12. Bleuler, l. c.