# Wishfulfillment and Symbolism in Fairy Tales/Chapter VI

CHAPTER VI
Transposition Upward. Infantilism.
A series of examples of sexual symbolism should be made of special mention in which transposition upward is utilized; Freud has shown how among the dream symbols that represent the female genitals, another bodily organ, the mouth, is often employed, and what happens to it in the dream signifies what happens to the genitals. That just this displacement to the mouth is frequently utilized by the dream has its foundation in different determining factors. The mouth, because of its analogy, is a very obvious symbol in the same body; the relation to one's own person may be given very simple expression, etc. The mouth, moreover, is one of the Freudian erogenous zones.
Jung has given illuminating examples of this from the dream of an hysteric and from a patient with dementia præcox.
The following example from the case history of an hysteric shows in an unequivocal way this "upward transposition," wherein the serpent symbol appears with the same significance as in "Oda and the Serpent."
A twenty-two year old woman suffered from hysteria of sexual genesis with a wonderfully clear, transparent structure. Special circumstances assisted the upward transposition of the ​main symptoms from below, that is, the genitals, to the throat (pain, inability to sing, hoarseness, dry throat, pressure in the throat, etc.). The patient often had dreams in which she was naked and was pursued by her former teacher or her father—two determining figures in the genesis of her illness—or she was thrown in a moss bed and her clothes torn off by a man.
Once she dreamt she was in the fields. The hay had been raked up into small piles—shocks. Suddenly a serpent appeared looking out from each hay shock. One especially large one slipped into her mouth and bit her palate. The hay shocks are the hairy portion of the genitals out of which the serpent, the penis, looks out, and so become a counterpart of the nymphæ forest cited by Freud, which represented the female genitals. In the fairy tales (and mythology) there is a whole series of similar transpositions. Their value lies, not only in offering a surprising confirmation of the Freudian views, but in that they are a serviceable result in comparative psychology.
In fairy tales it is for the most part barren women who become pregnant by eating (symbol of coitus with a symbolic object or animal). The child that results from this wonderful fertilization is usually a great hero.
In "Ivan Cow Son of the Storm Knight" in the Russian fairy stories (Afanassiew, Nr. 27) the fish is the male sexual symbol. (Perhaps the fish spawn and the great fruitfulness of fish, besides those qualities mentioned of the serpent, are new determining moments.)
A royal pair were still, after ten years, without children. Then the king sent to all rulers in all cities and to all peasants to find if any one knew how the queen could be cured so that she might bear a child. Of all who came no one could help except a peasant's son to whom the king gave a pile of gold and three days time. First, nothing occurred to him, not even in his dreams, then he met an old woman whom he had first spurned but finally confided his troubles to her.
She had him tell the king to order three silk nets to be woven and sink them in the sea before the palace windows. She said that a golden scaled pike was always swimming before the palace. ​If the king should catch him and have him served to the queen, she would be with child.
The peasant's son went himself on the sea; the pike jumped high out of the water and tore twice all three nets (symbol for the hymen?), until the fellow, for the third time, had repaired the nets with his belt and his silk neckerchief and then caught the fish.
The royal cook cleaned the fish and poured the dishwater out of the window, a cow going by licked it up. The servant who brought the cooked pike to the queen to eat, on the way broke off a piece of the fin and tasted it. All three now became with child at the same time: cow, maid, and queen. All three sons were alike as to hair and grew in hours as much as others in years. They were named Ivan Zarevitsch, Ivan Maidson, and Ivan Cowson—Storm Knight. Ivan Cowson, corresponding to the rule of fairy tales, was the strongest of the three and the hero of the following Herculean adventures, which brought him the nickname of "Storm Knight." The remaining pretty clear sexual symbolism is worthy of note. The substitution of the impotent king by the peasant's son, who gets the receipt for catching the wonderful fish from a witch, in whom one can easily see the personification of the sudden, brilliant notion during his meditation; further the fellow needs his belt to effect the catch.
The fairy tale: "The Godmother's Curse" ("Isländ. Volksmärchen," p. 68, No. 17) present a similar symbolism.
A young childless duchess, who longed very much for a child, went once for a walk, with her servant, in a beautiful grove. Here she was overcome by sleep, and being unable longer to resist it, lay down to rest. In a dream, three women dressed in blue appeared to her and said: "We know your wish and we would like to help you in its fulfillment. Go to a brook here in the neighborhood in which you will see a trout. Bend down and see that in drinking the trout swims into your mouth. Then you will soon after become pregnant. We will search later for the newborn child and give him a name." The queen followed these instructions and was brought to bed with a beautiful little daughter.
An old woman, who rendered service at the birth, prepared the table for only two of the women instead of for all three; on which account the youngest was angry. The two oldest gave the ​child beauty, goodness, and wisdom and in addition the gift that all her tears would be changed into gold. A fine prince would marry her and she would lead a happy life with him in love. The youngest did not revoke the blessings of her sisters. But she added as a penalty for her poor reception that the princess would become a sparrow on her wedding night and only for a short time during the first three nights should she regain her human form. If some one did not then quickly burn the sparrow skin, she must always remain a bird (compare "Kisa" and the Icelandic Cinderella).
The story then goes on to the fulfillment of the blessings and the curse and the final deliverance.
Prophetic dreams, as in this example, occur very frequently in fairy tales and their content itself is also dream-like.
That the third woman (or the thirteenth in "The Sleeping Beauty") should, out of anger, add a bad wish to the good wishes, is a common fairy tale motive.
One sees the wonderful impregnation under the symbol of transposition meet with a significant fate, and we often find characteristically the same motive in the bible, the children of long barren women become prominent men, or the procreation and birth of great men is represented as wonderful and mysterious. (Annunciation by the Angel Gabriel, conception by the Holy Ghost, vision of Zacharias, see Evang. Luke, I; promise of Isaac, Moses I, 17 and 18 Chap.; promise of Samson's birth, Judges, 13 and 14 Chap.; the whole history of Samson presents a great many fairy-story-like signs. Compare also the Hercules saga.)
The same motive appears in the beginning of the fairy tale "The Carnation" (Grimm, 76). There was a queen to whom God had denied children. She went every morning into the garden and prayed to God in heaven that he would bestow on her a son or a daughter. An angel came from heaven and said: "Be content, you shall have a son with wishful thoughts, for what he wishes for from this world that will he obtain." She went to the king and told him the happy news, and when the time came she bore a son, and the king was greatly rejoiced, etc.
Rittershaus, in his collection cited, gives still other examples of impregnation by the swallowing of fish. It occurs in other Icelandic sagas, in the Greek, Albanian and Sicilian fairy tales, ​with this difference, that in the Icelandic fairy tales already quoted the whole fish is swallowed, in others the fish, which is caught by a childless man, is cut up at the house and distributed to the wife, the horse, and the dogs (male sexual animals?).
I refer for the literary references to Rittershaus, p. 71.
Compare also the Russian fairy tale of "Ivan Cowson the Storm Knight."
In Grimm's fairy tale. No. 85, "The Gold Children," the same motive appears.
A poor fisherman caught a golden fish which promised him, instead of his hut, a castle and a cupboard which would contain everything he wished to eat, if he would throw him back into the water. He must, however, not say from whence these splendors came. Afterwards when he betrayed the secret to his curious wife the charm was dispelled and they sat again in the poor hut.
He caught the fish a second time and the same thing was repeated.
The third time the gold fish said: "Take me home and cut me up into six pieces: give two pieces to your wife to eat, two to your mare, and two bury in the earth. This will bring you blessings. From the two last pieces there grew two golden lilies, the mare had two golden foals, and the fisher's wife bore two golden children whose fate the story goes on to follow.
Of the manifold, concentrated, accumulated symbolisms of the fairy-tale fragment, especially the comparison with the fruitfulness of the earth which is repeatedly found in mythology, I will only note that in dreams the same theme is quite as commonly treated in various forms.
In this relation the prophetic dream of Pharaoh of the seven years of plenty and the seven years of famine stands out realistically.
The same theme appears first in the dream of the seven fat and the seven lean cows, then when Pharaoh sleeps again, in the dream of the ears of corn (Moses I, 41).
In the fairy tale of "Kisa" (=Cat, Rittershaus, p. 73, No. XVIII) the king threatens his childless queen, just as he was starting out on a journey, that he would have her killed if she had no child upon his return home. Sadly the queen sat in her garden. An old woman came to her and advised her to drink ​out of a Spring in the forest; in this spring were two trouts, one black and one white. She must swallow the white trout, but only that one and not the black one.
In spite of every care the two fish both slipped into the queen's mouth. After nine months she gave birth to a very beautiful girl and to a black cat.
The black cat, at first chased away, is then the assistant of the princess against a giant with whom she does not want to go and who thereupon cuts off her legs (abasia dream-motive?) and wishes to kill her. She heals her legs with the grass of life and kills the giant. At the marriage of the princess, Kisa again becomes a beautiful princess. A wicked stepmother has changed her and the princess into trout, she, however, from especial hate, she makes a cat at her new birth, which only after laying at the floor of the bridal bed of the princess on the wedding night, can be delivered.
Besides the sexual transposition and the motive of reincarnation the tale is full of sexual, dream-like symbolisms.
In a fairy story of Straparola (cited from Rittershaus, p. 76) a marchioness gives birth to a daughter and also an adder at the same time. In an analogous Norwegian tale (cited from Rittershaus, p. 76) a childless queen bathes one evening, on the advice of an old beggar woman, and sets the bath water under her bed.
In the morning two flowers have grown in it, one ugly and the other beautiful. As the flowers taste so good to her the queen eats them both contrary to the advice of the old woman. Then she bears two daughters, the first a true monster riding on a goat and then a lovely little girl, etc.
The flowers, which stand here in the place of the fishes, are also employed as male sexual symbols in pathology. Namely flower stems and lily stalks play this role in the delusions or dreams of dementia præcox as shown by association experiments. May not the lilies which Mary, Joseph and the Angel of the Annunciation often carry have a similar meaning instead of that usually accepted?
The bath water under the bed is throughout a sexual component of the dream-like fairy story.
The Freudian upward transposition is given in the eating of the flowers.
​In the literary references of Rittershaus (p. 77) we still find the simultaneous birth of a boy and an ichneumon in the Pantschatandra. Aso the son of a Brahman is born as a serpent, whose father, on the marriage night of his son, burned his serpent skin so that the son retained his human form. (Benfey, "Pantschatandra, Fünf Bücher indischer Fabeln, Märchen und Erzählungen," Leipzig, 1859, Bd. II, p. 147, cited by Rittershaus, p. 77).
According to Benfey (cited by Rittershaus, p. 77) the burning of the animal hide, through which the enchanted man becomes compelled to keep his human form, is a Hindu belief.
It can hardly be demonstrated that the burning of the animal hide originally appears only in a sexual connection (as previously in the wedding night); however, it appears so in very many cases and the deliverance from enchantment and the espousal appear together almost always in the fairy tales, which represent sexual wish-structures, which, after what has been said of the significance of enchantment in the sexual wish-tales, is understandable. The Brahman story cited induces me, therefore, to draw attention to the sexually symbolic significance of fire in dreams, as Freud ("Bruckstück," etc.) confirmed by Jung (Diagnost. Assoc. Studien, VIII Beitrag) has explained and of which I myself possess good examples, and to point out that here again is shown an accumulation of sexual symbols (serpent, fire).
I also wish to call attention to the fire-engine dream. A double question, which at any rate the symbolism of "upward transposition" makes use of and at the same time explains, is propounded by the giantesses to the king's son whom they have stolen (Rittershaus, No. 41, p. 173). The peasant's daughter Signy, who sets out to seek and to save him, finds him in an enchanted sleep in the cave of the giantesses, listens how they awake him by the song of swans and how the younger asks him whether he wishes to eat? He answers no. Thereupon she asks him if he will marry her? To that also he replies no, with horror. Thereupon the prince is lulled to sleep again by the same song. This goes ​on and on until the peasant's daughter wakens him in the same manner from his enchanted sleep and after that she rescues him.
The Russian fairy tales contain still more examples of transposition.
In "The Little Bear and the Three Knights, Mustachio, Mover-of-Mountains, and Uprooter-of-Oaks" (Afanassiew—A. Meyer, No. 28) the childless wife buys, at the command of her husband, two turnips. One they ate, the other they put in the oven, in order to dry it. After a while a small voice cries out: "Little mother, open the door, it is too hot in here!" She opened the oven door and there lay a living girl in the stove pipe. "What is that?" asked the husband. "Oh, little father, God has sent us a child!" They named it Little Turnip.
Later the Little Turnip, while searching for berries with other little girls, lost her way in a thick, gloomy forest. They came to a little cottage in which a bear was sitting. He brought some porridge and said: "Eat pretty girls. Who does not eat must be my wife." All the little girls ate except Little Turnip and they were allowed to go. Little Turnip, however, was retained. Little Turnip grew constantly larger, escaped one day, and at home soon had a son, half man, half bear, whom they christened Iwaschko, Little-Bear. He grew, not in years but in hours (as is often the case with fairy tale heroes), accomplished Herculean deeds, and finally rescued a maiden who was held captive in the under world by the great witch. Comment is quite superfluous. The beginning by eating the turnip and the incubation in the stove-pipe instead of the uterus, might as well have its origin in a dream (compare the example of the dream with the stove-pipe). Also here the people are old and childless. The two turnips, instead of only one, correspond to an already pointed out dream phenomenon; the problem here is to unite impregnation and pregnancy in one dream. Turnip is also applied by our peasants in their rude, rough wit as a symbol of the male organ of copulation, of which I know several examples.
The fairy tale of "Little Turnip" gives us the key to unlock the meaning of the beginning of the fairy tale "Rampion," (Grimm, No. 12).
A man and his wife wished a long time in vain for a child. At the back of the house was a little window from which one could ​look into a magnificent garden which was surrounded by a high wall. It belonged to a dreadful witch. The wife saw a beautiful bed of rampions [radishes]. She was seized with an uncontrollable longing to eat rampions so that she wasted away and looked wretched and answered anxious questions by saying: "Oh, if I cannot get some of those rampions to eat that grow in the garden back of our house, I shall die." Her husband climbed into the garden of the enchantress and, at any cost, dug up some rampions and brought them to his wife. She made them into a salad at once and ate it with a great relish.
The enchantress afterwards desired of the man that, for the rampions, he should give her the child that his wife would bear. The enchantress came at once to take the child away and she named it Rampion. The further fate of Rampion with the long hair, and her final rescue by a prince, we need not go into.
Sexual transposition is also suggested in a passage in the fairy tale, "Everything Depends on God's Blessing" (Afanassiew—A. Meyer, No. 22, p. 95).
A devil relates how he has made a czarina (princess) sick; she is blind, deaf and confused. In order to make her well one must take the cross from a particular church, pour water over it, wash the princess with this water and give it to her to drink. Under a special stone sits a frog (masculine sex animal) which must be caught and a piece of the Host, which he has stolen, taken from his mouth. This the princess must eat.
The hero of the story follows these instructions, makes the princess well, and she becomes his bride.
Whoever understands the nature of the "complex" of which we have spoken in our work ("Diagnostische Associationsstudien," etc.) will understand the language of this fairy tale!
The mention of the Host in this connection suggests that the love-feast of Christ, as it is now celebrated as a devout communion, may be erotically colored. However, a digression into religious erotics would lead us too far afield.
The "History of Wassilissa with the Golden Braid and Ivan-from-the-Pea" (Afanassiew—A. Meyer, No. 26, p. 130) contains a further example. In it a splendid fairy-tale language relates of the wonderfully beautiful Wassilissa, who languished in her dungeon, her heart oppressed by sadness, until her father, the ​Czar Swietosar, prepared her, that she must choose one among the many royal suitors. She was allowed now, for the first time, to go walking and search for flowers. She went with her face unveiled, her beauty was without protection. She became separated a little, innocently, from her attendants, and was carried away by a mighty storm to the land of the cruel dragon. Her two brothers, who sought her and came, after long journeys, to the enchanted castle of the imprisoned Wassilissa, were killed by him. Wassilissa with the golden hair thought nevertheless of rescue and through flattery wheedled the secret from the dragon that no adversary lived who was stronger than he. However, jokingly he added, that at his birth it was foretold that his adversary was named Ivan Pea.
The mourning mother of the beautiful Wassilissa went to walk in the garden with the Bojar woman. The day was hot and she wanted a drink. In the garden there broke from the slope of a hill a stream of spring water which was caught in a white marble trough. She dipped up the clear, pure water with a ladle and drank hastily swallowing thereby, suddenly, a pea. The pea swelled and the Czarina had a sinking spell. The pea continued to grow and the Czarina had to carry the burden.
After a time a son arrived, Ivan-from-the-Pea, who grew by hours instead of by years and in ten years became a knight of marvellous strength who conquered the dragon and rescued Wassilissa, etc.
This fairy tale calls to mind two mythological representations of impregnation after the manner of the Freudian transposition, of Demeter's daughter Cora and Eve in Paradise.
Cora, the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, with the daughters of Oceanus, looked for spring flowers. As she plucked the death's flower narcissus the earth suddenly opened, and Hades rose and stole Cora from the midst of her companions.
Later Zeus, who first put aside the prayers to send her back, condescended to the arrangement that Cora need only spend a third of the year in the underworld. The denial of a return altogether was based upon Cora having received from her spouse the seed of a pomegranate and eaten it—symbol of fertilization (cited from Stending, "Griechische und römische Mythologie," Leipzig, Göschen, 1905, III Auflage).
​The biblical tale of the fall has been looked upon for a long time as an impregnation symbolism. We find here also a condensation: The serpent is the betrayer and through it first comes the transposition through the eating of the fruit. After this Adam and Eve see that they are naked and are ashamed, and it is prophesied that Eve will bear and bring forth in pain. Following this the Bible tells us besides of the wish-formed enchanted gift of which we have earlier noted a series from mythology and fairy tales. It deals with the fruit of the tree of life. "And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become one of us, to know good and evil: and now lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man: and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life (Moses I, 3 Chap., 22-24).
Many representations of the Annunciation show the same accumulation of symbols to represent the same things as above (serpent, fruit, eat). A master of the Life of Mary in the old Pinakothek in Munich shows us Mary, who is surprised in her contemplations by an angel with a message. He bears a lily stalk (compare the example mentioned previously where the angel appears to be an impregnation symbol); the Holy Ghost, by whom Mary shall conceive, descends in the form of a dove (compare the bird symbolism in fairy tales). Above is God the Father, from whom a bundle of rays descend down which an extremely small male child with the cross flies as a sign to Mary. Still one may doubt my explanation! Besides this old master liked to remember an elegant bed in the background of Mary's bedchamber in his representations of the Annunciation.
The examples from fairy tales in which the "upward transposition" plays a rôle are proofs for infantile sexual theories; for which reason the view has developed that this masking of sexual processes took its origin in the telling of fairy stories by women.
​Now we know, however, that also in dreams infantilism gets a very great expansion in order that the wishes of the unconscious by being properly censured may express themselves in the dream. The fairy tale of "The Little Bear," "Ivan-of-the-Pea" and similar ones represent these infantile sexual theories quite convincingly.
In Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams" ("V. The Material and Sources of Dreams") the significance of the infantile material in the dream is sufficiently illustrated and analyzed. What wonder, if in the fairy tales of these dream-like structures from chidhood, mankind expands itself.
We find the same immorality. The obstinate princess lets many wooers perish until the right one comes who solves the riddle. The egotistic standpoint dominates, the altruistic has not yet appeared, as in children. Killing of the nearest relatives, as in children, so in fairy tale wish-structure, is only the wish to get rid of somebody.
The infantile rivalries, as they are set forth in a masterly way in Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams," find expression in the story of "The Twelve Brothers" (Grimm, No. 27); if the thirteenth child, the youngest, was a girl, the twelve older, the brothers, would be murdered; the father (naturally; the rival of the same sex! see Interpretation of Dreams) had the twelve caskets already prepared; therefore they had to run away. Similarly in the story of "The Seven Ravens" (Grimm, No. 25).
In certain stepmother tales one receives the impression that the component "mother" in the word "stepmother" is overdetermined. We have seen the stepmother appear, beside other figures: giantess, witch, etc., in the role of sexual rival. Now we know from Freud that the mother herself may be the sexual rival of the daughter. The infantile egoism of the dream and the fairy-tale does not delay having the good mother die (first, an infantile wish, see "Interpretation of Dreams," second, it signifies: the good mother no longer exists for the heroine, the child or the infantile component of the grown wife as daughter, because she has become a bad figure, a rival). She is substituted by the wicked stepmother, which means that the mother has become this figure to the fairy-tale heroine or the dreamer. Here a motive from "Cinderella" becomes understandable, as ​expressing infantilism. The wish-tree grows on the grave of the mother (stepmother). The mother must die.
A woman of my acquaintance maintained the belief through her whole childhood, until she was about fifteen years of age, that she was a foundling; she held fast to the idea. It rested upon a remark of the mother: "Oh, probably some one picked you up on the street." This remark, of which the memory was perfectly clear, compels us to assume that the child had asked from where she came. The delusion built itself up on an adapted and strongly believed theory of sex. Mark Twain, with great psychological understanding, has somewhere said: "Faith insists on believing something that one does not believe." If the child was bad the mother would probably say: "Strange, she is not like anyone in the family." A fine wish-thought that nourished still further the delusion. At the same time the "bad" child felt that the mother did not mean well by her; so she could not possibly be a true mother to her. If we render "bad" with "egoistic" in the rivalry; when we note that the mother, after the death of the father, was especially solicitous to bring up a pleasing, well-mannered young woman with a good name, because gossip is much more apt to arise about a family without a father at the head, the vitality of this childish delusion becomes for us so much the more understandable. These "bad experiences" have, in a significant manner, taken refuge in the delusion, while in reality the relations between mother and daughter were very good.
This infantile delusion has thus made a bad stepmother out of the mother, and the fairy-tale does the same thing.
Precisely in the fairy-tales of the persecuted beauty, in "Little Snow-White," this process is described with special detail in its beginnings. The beautiful queen, who becomes the stepmother, hates the still more beautiful "Little Snow-White." The fairy tale corresponds thus to a "dream" of the heroine, Little Snow-White, under the influence of the infantile material. So finally the meaning of this fairy tale is clear and also all others with a similar theme.
We are satisfied, for the time being, with this intimation, in order to sketch the great rôle of infantilism in fairy tales which ​they share with dreams. There could naturally be found innumerable others; the question here is regarding a problem which must be separately solved.
* ↑ Especially in "Bruchstücke einer Hysterieanalyse," Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie, Bd. XVIII, 1905.
* ↑ Jung, "= Diagnostische Associationsstudien," VIII Beitrag.
* ↑ Her father loved her, sexually; it struck her as a child that he, besides other evidences of tenderness, slapped her in a peculiar way on her nates, and indeed only in the absence of her mother. When she was fifteen years old, and, on the occasion of a holiday play, looked very pretty in her costume, her teacher (an alcoholic) and her father, who also had been drinking too much on this day, sought—one following another—to seduce her. These experiences had no pathogenic results until after her father jealously destroyed her tender relations with a young man. From then on she was unable to sing in the singing club directed by that teacher. The transposition of the symptoms was completed by an undeserved box on the ear,—the only one,—a counterpart to the sexual caresses, transposed upward, which the father applied to her somewhat later in a fit of jealousy.
* ↑ Freud, Journal für Psychologie und Neurologie, Bd. VIII, 1906. Bruckstück, l. c., p. 450.
* ↑ An example, that enchantment signifies a sexual revenge, one can find in B. Schmidt, "Das Volksleben der Neugriechen," p. 112. A nereid transformed her beloved, her untrue lover, into a serpent; he should remain enchanted until he found a sweetheart who was equal to her in beauty! (A special case, which allows us to assume, that also in the case of the serpent of Oda a sexual motive conditioned the enchantment.)
* ↑ I refer to the work of Aug. Wünsche, "Die Sagen vom Lebensbaum und Lebenswasser." Altorientalische Mythen, from the collection "Ex oriente lux," edited by H. Winckler, Bd. I, Heft 2/3, Leipzig, E. Pfeiffer, 1905.
* ↑ I could give numerous examples of analogous delusions in young women who were well and in women with dementia præcox.
* ↑ One finds in these stepmother fairy tales, for example, that the father sexually pursues the daughter, or as in "The Lark," brings the male sexual symbol. He is replaced by the wish prince.