Franz Ricklin

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The serpent is here the prince, in the language of fairy tales that signifies the wished-for man. The symbol is by no means, however, accidental. As in magic and fairy-tale symbolism the part (for example the charm) almost always stands in place of the whole; that is protects from the bewitched or from magic, or calls forth magic, so is also the serpent a part of the man, namely the phallus. In the story of Oda this substitution is apparent. One has the feeling in reading it it might just as well have been the relation of a dream which a patient with hysteria or dementia præcox had had. ”

“ This tale, whose single motive in similar connection often recurs, shows us again, that the spell was cast on the hero by a hostile power, the reason being that he was to marry a rival of the heroine (i. e., in the dream of the dreamer) and was unwilling to do so. That compares well with the delusions of certain patients, that their loved one is misled by others and taken away from them. The sexual rivals in the fairy tales are usually sorcerers and witches, who at the conclusion, through the wish-fulfillment of the fairy-tale dream, are very severely punished. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Daily she spread for her husband who was afar off, a miniature meal on a small table, as if the manes and gods offered it. If there is moisture on the inner side of this little dish cover, she is peaceful, because she is then certain, according to the prevailing belief, that her absent sweetheart still lives. Her small boy is her constant joy and she busies herself with him in various intimate ways. ”

“ The fairy tale also, since it appears as a wish-fulfilling structure, may also often gather its material from widely separate sources, from other fairy tales, from myths, which in their essentials have a different content, in order to arrange the parts into a new whole, with a new content.
"Freud maintains, that our psyche has the tendency to so work over the world picture that it corresponds to our wishes and efforts. This tendency comes to light unhindered in all situations where thoughts, as moulded by external circumstances, are disturbed in their logical relations to reality. ”

“ Finally my work itself proves to me that the human psyche produces at all times and in all places suggestive and hypnotic phenomena, produces universally, just as general, for example, a symbolism, which is chiefly constructed from the unconscious and which is found in fairy tales as a primitive poetic production, and again in the dream and in psychopathology. ”

“ If we take these fairy tales as such they must be conceived at once as wish dreams or other corresponding wish structures of the rejected maidens or the simpletons. A similar relation can be worked out as with the motive of "The Little Tear Jug." What can be for the individual a healing, wish-fulfilling surrogate for reality, can also be generalized as a wish product of a whole set of people, of an entire category of people living under the same conditions, in which connection the appropriateness is not as important as the psychological tendency to think in the sense of the wish. ”

“ There are magic wands for turning living or lifeless beings into what one wishes and not the least in order to injure one's enemies. There are means to look into the future and to attain one's wishes, apples of life and water of life for rejuvenation and the preservation of this otherwise all too short existence.
This enumeration is naturally quite incomplete; it contains only examples. A more detailed citation is probably superfluous as in every collection of fairy tales examples may be found without much difficulty and mythology contains numerous proofs. ”

“ Those fairy tales with a cruelty motive, where a savage dragon who rules in a neighboring kingdom daily or yearly desires the sacrifice of a maiden, are now understandable to us.
The solution consists in that the dragon is thought of as the rival of a hero who frees the princess and vanquishes the dragon. In place of the dragon another cruel, masculine principle may appear. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To conclude I would like to mention that group of beautiful fairy tales in which the motive of the persecuted beauty is dealt with, a motive, the erotic basis of which is very clear. One can hardly go wrong if one conceives of the persecution as a sexual rivalry; the persecutor will do some harm to the heroine with the object of preventing her marriage with a prince. ”

“ Now certainly the scientific method in the psychological exploration of fairy tales is circumscribed by the investigation of dreams and of psychotic structures. Here, through many experiments, one can follow the sources and association paths which the elements in the formation of the dream story or the delusional structure have supplied. One can compel the psyche, through such wider information, to affirm or deny its meaning. ”

“ In itself it is not striking that the fairy tale should concern itself so much about kings; the matter acquires a wish coloring, however, as soon as we consider many fairy tales in which the poor peasant maid marries a prince and the shepherd boy a princess. Those are wish structures!
A whole mass of means serve for the betterment of human deficiencies. ”

“ Freud [1] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At night he is a prince in human form, during the day time, however, he is bewitched and is a lion. At night the wedding is celebrated and during the day they sleep.
Mythology gives us some information about the spell that lay upon the lion.
"There is a universal belief, and a cult bound up with it, of the separate existence of the soul when it has left the body after death. Two phenomena of human life have occasioned this belief: the dream and death. Sleep and death exist in the ideas of most peoples as like processes and are therefore treated in poetry as brothers. ”

“ There are countless fairy tales which when submitted to analysis and taken as a whole are found to represent the most splendid wish structures. Innumerable fairy tales, as well as myths and legends, tell us about magic gifts, objects and qualities, which the human wish-phantasy has created. ”

“ The moment of the going over of the sexual disgust to love is somewhat displaced. Quite clearly, still more so than with Oda, is represented the original sexual aversion and prudery of the maiden, the uneasiness and shyness before the crude sexual, the penis. That there is already a sexual wish present we know. The form of the wished-for prince (serpent, frog, bear, etc.) supports a new determination. It represents the sexual uneasiness, disgust. Instead of the tale describing the change in the heroine it projects it upon the wish object. ”

“ In the fairy tale "The Two Brothers" (Grimm, 60) a hunter comes to a city where sadness reigns. Outside the city is a high mountain on which lives a dragon who, every year, must have a pure young maiden, otherwise he lays waste the land. Now only the king's daughter is left who is to be sacrificed on the following day. The hero receives superhuman strength by drinking from a magic goblet, kills the dragon and marries the princess. ”

“ 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.) ”

“ We turn to numberless wish structures occurring in fairy tales—also in mythology, legends, beliefs in magic, etc.—which may be pointed out with little difficulty to correspond, in part most naïvely, to human wishes created from our insufficiencies, this is one side of their significance at least. ”

“ 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 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, [4] 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) . ”

“ With the idea of the dream-soul goes along also that of nightmare (Druckgeitser?) .
"Out of the belief in the dream soul has grown the conviction that certain men possess the power to separate their souls from their bodies and take other forms."
"In the form of dangerous animals (wolf, bear, dragon) such men bring harm to others; therefore it is strongly punished by law. Here belong the witches and Völven" (volu = magic wand, volvur = sorceress) . "They make bad weather, make men and beasts sick, are able to transfix people to a spot, and can take all possible animal forms." ”

“ There is scarcely a more magnificent life and he himself is a mighty hero." The old man silently gathered all her belongings, ordered his daughter to put on her sheep skins and started on the way. He finally came to the pine, and turned from the road just as the snow began to fall. In the solitude the old man stopped, ordered his daughter to get out, set her basket under an immense pine and said: "Sit here, await the bridegroom and receive him pleasantly."
Then he turned his horse about and went back home. The little girl sat there and trembled, the cold benumbed her. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Instead of to her wedding, Psyche was conducted, in obedience to the Oracle, up the mountain in her bridal attire.
In characteristic manner she herself (like other fairy-tale princesses in similar sagas) is less troubled than those about her and urges herself to the fulfillment of the Oracle's command. (One is tempted to say: She just knows that nothing evil will befall her!) ”

“ The young woman almost regularly saw herself pursued in her dreams by her naked father. Her wish-dream corresponded in principle to the Drudge-of-all-Work motive. Instead of the original sweetheart there appeared indeed later in the dream also the substitution through the physician, a frequent occurrence in the process of cure emphasized by Freud (transference on the physician) .
The father first appeared as sexual persecutor and rival in the dream and in the hysterical structure at the moment when he stopped the relation of his daughter to her true sweetheart. ”