Iakov Levi

 

Rapunzel and Other Stories of Beautiful Hair

      Sept. 21, 2005

       The Story:
 

When she was twelve years old, the enchantress shut her into a tower, which lay in a forest, and had neither stairs nor door, but
quite at the top was a little window.  When the enchantress wanted to go in, she placed herself beneath it and cried: “Rapunzel,
Rapunzel, let down your hair to me”. Rapunzel had magnificent long hair, fine as spun gold, and when she heard the voice of the
enchantress she unfastened  her braided  tresses, wound them round one of the hooks of the window above, and then the hair
fell twenty ells down, and the enchantress climbed up by it.
After a year or two, it came to pass that the king's son rode through the forest and passed by the tower.
Then he heard a song, which was so charming that he stood still and listened.  This was Rapunzel, who in her solitude passed her
time in letting her sweet voice resound.  The king's son wanted to climb up to her, and looked for the door of the tower, but none
was to be found.
He rode home, but the singing had so deeply touched his heart, that every day he went out into the forest and listened to it.  Once when
he was thus standing behind a tree, he saw that an enchantress came there, and he heard how she cried: “Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
let down your hair”.
Then Rapunzel let down the braids of her hair, and the enchantress climbed up to her.  If that is the ladder by which one mounts,
I too will try my fortune, said he, and the next day when it began to grow dark, he went to the tower and cried: “Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
let down your hair”.
Immediately the hair fell down and the king's son climbed up. At first Rapunzel was terribly frightened when a man, such as
her eyes had never yet beheld, came to her.  But the king's son began to talk to her quite like a friend, and told her that his
heart had been so stirred that it had let him have no rest, and he had been forced to see her.  Then Rapunzel lost her fear, and when
he asked her if she would take him for her husband, and she saw that he was young and handsome, she thought, he will love me more than old dame gothel does.  And she said yes, and laid her hand in his. She said, I will willingly go away with you, but I do not know
how to get down.  Bring with you a skein of silk every time that you come, and I will weave a ladder with it, and when that is ready
I will descend, and you will take me on your horse.  They agreed that until that time he should come to her every evening, for the
old woman came by day.  The enchantress remarked nothing of this, until once Rapunzel said to her, tell me, dame gothel, how
it happens that you are so much heavier for me to draw up than the young king's son - he is with me in a moment.  Ah. You
wicked child, cried the enchantress.  What do I hear you say.  I thought I had separated you from all the world, and yet you have
deceived me.  In her anger she clutched Rapunzel's beautiful tresses, wrapped them twice round her left hand, seized a pair of scissors with the right, and snip, snap, they were cut off, and the lovely braids lay on the ground.  And she was so pitiless that she
took poor Rapunzel into a desert where she had to live in great grief and misery.
On the same day that she cast out Rapunzel, however, the enchantress fastened the braids of hair, which she had cut off, to
the hook of the window, and when the king's son came and cried: “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair”, she let the hair down.
The king's son ascended, but instead of finding his dearest Rapunzel, he found the enchantress, who gazed at him with wicked and venomous looks.  Aha, she cried mockingly, you would fetch your dearest, but the beautiful bird sits no longer singing in the nest.  The cat has got it, and will scratch out your eyes as well.  Rapunzel is lost to you.  You will never see her again.  The king's son was beside himself with pain, and in his despair he leapt down from the tower.  He escaped with his life, but the thorns into which he fell pierced his eyes.  Then he wandered quite blind about the forest, ate nothing but roots and berries, and did naught but lament and weep over the loss of his dearest wife. Thus he roamed about in misery for some years, and at length came to the desert where Rapunzel, with the twins to which she had given birth, a boy and a girl, lived in wretchedness. He heard a voice, and it seemed so familiar to him that he went towards it, and when he approached, Rapunzel knew him and fell on his neck and wept.
Two of her tears wetted his eyes and they grew clear again, and he could see with them as before. He led her to his kingdom where he was joyfully received, and they lived for a long time afterwards, happy and contented.

   (   http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/grimmtmp/009.txt   )

 

The tale contains some elements that we find also in Greek myth. Rapunzel gives to the hero her hair as a rope, to find his way while performing his heroic deed, which, as the tale explicitly says, is to reach her. In Greek myth, Ariadne gives to Theseus  a thread, to find his way while performing the heroic deed, which is to kill the Minotaur, the totemic beast. As Freud has shown, the totemic beast of myths and tales represents a paternal imago[1]. However, totemic beasts in myths usually condense also some aspects of the unconscious image of the Mother. For instance, The Sphinx in Oedipus’ tragedy, being a lion usually represented with breasts, condenses both the paternal (the lion) and the maternal (the breasts) images. Heracles kills the Hydra, a female phallic monster with many heads, Bellerophon kills the Chymera, another poly-phallic female symbol, Saint George kills the dragon, which, being a huge snake, is a female phallic symbol[2], and even Pinocchio encounters a snake in his way, during his own initiation heroic deed. Namely, the young hero must defeat the female penis symbol, in order to perform the heterosexual penetration, and in this way to complete his initiation heroic deed.
Perseus kills the Medusa, Tamino, the hero of The Magic Flute, begins his initiation saga with the death of a huge snake, and Ovid’s Apollo, who is the patron of the young heroes testing themselves in the Pythian games, kills the Python which was threatening mankind, et. All the heroes must first kill a female monster, in order to be granted the woman.

In Rapunzel’s tale, the female phallic monster is represented by the enchantress. She fights the hero, who is in his way to reach the woman.

At first, the prince is overwhelmed by the female monster, but eventually he is granted the woman, who also cures his blinded eyes by her love. In the meantime, she had given birth to twins. This is another element which is present in the mythology of the heroes, as in the saga of Romulus and Remus, and in the biblical story of Jacob and Esau.

Like Oedipus, the king’s son of Rapunzel's story pays for his daring deed by blinded eyes, hinting at the unconscious incestuous substance  of every craving for a woman. As in Oedipus’ myth,  the thorns into which he fell pierced his eyes is synonymous of castration. Both Oedipus, and the king’s son, wander helpless in their blindness.In Rapunzel’s tale, what seems to be new is that the heroine, too, is punished by castration. As we shall see, Jocasta’s suicide by hanging, symbolizes castration, too.
In Medusa’s myth, the hair is symbol of the pubic hair, and the snakes growing from it are multiple penis  (cf. S. Freud, Medusa’s Head, 1940 ).
Tresses of braided hair growing from the head are equivalent to Medusa’s serpents. The enchantress “In her anger she clutched Rapunzel's beautiful tresses, wrapped them twice round her left hand, seized a pair of scissors with the right, and snip, snap, they were cut off, and the lovely braids lay on the ground”. “Snip, snap, they were cut off” is an obvious description of castration.

A psychoanalyst told me of one of his patients who dreamed of his father, attached to a rope, hanging on an abyss, and fishing into a waterfall. As the say goes: "To hang by a thread".
Then, the father stared at him with a very angry glance. By the chain of associations subsequent to the dream, it became clear that what the patient was omitting is that he had desired to cut that rope, which held his father from falling into the abyss. Therefore, the instinctual drive expressed by the dream is to castrate his father. Since water is always associated with the mother [3], the dream expressed the fantasy of seeing his father performing intercourse with his mother (fishing into the water), and at that very time castrating him (cutting the rope). The penis’ symbol (the rope) [3b] was displaced from the lower part of father’s body into the higher par of the representation. The inversion, typical to dreams, represented the father held by a rope, instead of the other way around: the father holding the rope.

In Oedipus’ myth, apparently the woman escapes the punishment of castration. However, Jocasta hangs herself. A rope, on which she committed suicide, is equivalent to Rapunzel’s tresses. Moreover, as Freud has shown, death is psychically equivalent to castration (“The Uncanny" [Das Unheimliche], 1919) [4].

           The other heroine of the rope, Ariadne, according to the Odyssey was abducted and taken to the island of Dia where she died, because Artemis put her to            death. According to another version of the myth, she died in Amathus on the island of Cyprus during her childbirth           ( http://www.pantheon.org/articles/a/ariadne.html).
           One way or the other, death – castration are associated with having helped the hero in his heroic deed.

           I shall focus on long hair, which represents the fantasized missing penis, and on other female penis substitutes.

           As we have seen in Rapunzel’s tale, the hero craves for the hair – female penis, which is benevolent and helping to him. He even climbs on it.
           As Freud has shown, in dreams symbolism climbing (steigen) has an obvious sexual connotation [5]

Ariadne helps Theseus offering him a rope (her penis) through which to descend and ascend the labyrinth.

Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ lover and companion, is always represented with long and fluent hair. Sometimes, she gathers it in tresses, too. She even wipes Jesus’ feet with her hair. Again, a helping and loving female penis.

Juliet too, is always represented with long hair, which is craved by Romeo. The scenes describing the dialogue between the two, while Juliet stands on the balcony and Romeo craves at her from below, are very similar to the scene described in Rapunzel’s tale.

In these scenes we see a young hero, standing in a low place, and craving at the woman above him. The link between the two is the female member which she bestows upon him. In Theseus and Ariadne too, the female stands at the opening of the labyrinth, while the hero descends and ascends (in the myth Jesus – Mary Magdalene there is an obvious inversion: he stays above and she below – See Christ in the House of Simon - Rubens).

From what we have seen so far, the story is one of incestuous Oedipal love between man and woman. However, in the condensation peculiar to dreams and mythical fantasies, it is possible that fantasies of birth too are activated, in the context of some regressive economic (quantitative) distribution of the libido. In the process of libidinal regression from higher psychosexual levels of organization, an activation of early models is usually triggered. So, there is no contradiction in seeing in the rope – hair a symbol of the female penis, and of the umbilical cord at the same time. In a progressive Oedipal -genital context, the female penis represents her genital, while in a regressive distribution of the libido, it is unconsciously interpreted as umbilical cord.

       

And

Million Dollar Baby: the same huge tress represents the condensation of the fantasized female penis and Faeces. As Freud has shown, preciousness - jewels are the symbol of the female genital, and money stands for Faeces. It is quite an Uncanny image, very condensed. Million Dollar Baby: a lot of money, precious like Faeces and the female genital, and Baby, associating to the cloacal theory, according to which children are convinced that babies exit the mother's body through the anus. Moreover, Freud and Abraham, have shown the unconscious equivalence between female penis, Faeces, and child (See Note 7 below and see Medusa, the Female Genital and the Nazis).

As Freud and Abraham have shown, the little Oedipal child, directs at the mother his first genital urges, and later at other females in the family. Experiencing that urge at the genital, he is in search of a similar member in the female, towards which to direct it. However, he cannot find what is not there. At this point, he does not give up, because he cannot renounce his own instinctual need. So, he wonders where this missing member actually is. In his endeavour, he advances to himself several theories. Abraham has shown that one of the solutions is in drawing an equivalence between penis (which he cannot find in females) and breasts (which females own and males do not)[6]. However, before operating a displacement from the low belly to the upper part of the body, the child feels that the female penis is inside the body, and comes out in the form of faeces [7]. The faecal column is also interpreted as a penis, due to the child’s own previous erotic excitement while defecating. In a regressive distribution of the libido, genital excitement becomes equivalent to defecation, and the faecal column becomes equivalent to a penis in erection. In this context, the female faecal column is interpreted as her missing penis. He did not find the female penis where it should be, namely in the front. So, he searches it behind, where there is its substitute: the faecal column.

This is the reason why many men have a particular affection for females’ buttocks, and at the same time they disdain the female genital. They could not overcome the stress and the delusion associated with the non – view of the female penis, and now they still search it in the rear, from where they did see it exiting. For the same reason, many prefer anal penetration to the more natural way.

Such men fantasize that penetrating through the anus they will meet there, in the form of faecal column, the female penis they did not find when they searched for it in its alleged place.


As we have seen, a tress and braided hair are a  penis substitute. Furthermore, they are in the rear part of the body, like the faecal column. The displacement of libidinal energies from the genital to the upper (or lower) part of the body is a very usual mechanism in dreams and neurotic symptoms: eyes – teeth – nose – feet – hands are all penis substitutes. The process unfolded as follows: missing female penis – faecal column (displacement to the rear) – tress (displacement to the upper part of the body).




The Unconscious and Art

            
Matisse                                                                Degas



       
Arturo Martini: La Lupa Ferita (The Wounded She-Wolf)


    
Chagall: Nude Upon Vitebsk                                                Manzů: Sitting Girl      



The Giacomo Manzu Collection at Ardea (Rome)

                            ...And Matisse in Berlin




La Madonna della cintola (The Madonna of the Belt)

In museums and Catholic churches there are many images of the Virgin called “Madonna della cintola”, which depict the Mother of Jesus as a merciful woman bestowing her own belt to saints and worshippers. The worshipper usually stands at her feet, craving for the Virgin’s belt. As Ariadne,  she offers a rope, and as Rapunzel she seems to propose to the saint to grasp it, and to ascend to her.

                                                   

La Madonna della cintola by Lorenzo di Credi                  La Virjen de la cinta in Barcellona                          



Postscript (Oct. 7, 2005)

Since the article was completed, a couple of months ago, I have been wondering where is Rapunzel – Madonna della cintola, and other female penis-Faeces – umbilical cord representations in Hebrew mythology. After all, the same nuclear elements of instinctual needs searching for an expression are present in different ways in the all stories and mythology of the peoples. The instinctual need is the same everywhere, and only the external expression, which is filtered by the Ego’s overlay, differs from people to people. The Greeks – Romans expressed themselves through the imagery of the sagas of the Heroes: A detailed narrative accompanied by sculptures and reliefs. The Catholics, who inherited the frame of mind and the cultural patterns of their Greek –Roman predecessors, enhanced even more the medium of the eye as an instrument for expressing unconscious contents: sculptures and paintings tell it all, even without the help of a detailed narrative. The eye is the story-teller as every traveler through churches and palaces in the Catholic world is able to witness. The Protestants who, like the Jews, feel hostility to the icon worshipping mode of the Classic-Catholic world, easily reconnected to the story-telling mode of their tribal ancestors. From the Grimm brothers to Andersen, the fairy tale is Nordic, not Catholic. The Jews, on the other hand, were utterly straight-jacked by the impositions of an intolerant iconoclastic religion, which not only hindered every image expression, but also limited the scope of the story telling to the declared religious aims of the Second Temple priestly class - firstly - and of the Rabbis, after then. The original Hebrew mythology was repressed and the ancient folklore stories were distorted, in order to fit the new post-Exile monotheistic religion. The instinctual needs, expressed by the Greek- Romans in the sagas of the Heroes and their deeds, and certainly present in the stories handed over from generation to generation in Hebrew mythology too - as in that of other Semitic peoples of the region - were converted into pious stories making an apology of a sole almighty god and his relationship to his chosen people. The Bible, and the Oral Law thereafter, remained the only containers of the people's mythology.
The original narrative was distorted and compressed. Nevertheless it did not disappear, and its traces are scattered everywhere in the text in a disguised form, albeit adapted to the official ideology. All the elements of the mythology of the peoples are present in the Bible, albeit concealed in a compressed and condensed form.
Here she is, the biblical Rapunzel –Ariadne - Madonna della cintola (and Mary Magdalene in the same condensation):

Joshua the son of Nun sent out of Shittim two men as spies secretly, saying, Go, view the land, and Jericho. They went and came into the house of a prostitute whose name was Rahab, and lay there. It was told the king of Jericho, saying, Behold, there came men in here tonight of the children of Israel to search out the land. The king of Jericho sent to Rahab, saying, Bring forth the men who are come to you, who have entered into your house; for they have come to search out all the land. The woman took the two men, and hid them; and she said, Yes, the men came to me, but I didn't know whence they were: and it happened about the time of the shutting of the gate, when it was dark, that the men went out; where the men went I don't know: pursue after them quickly; for you will overtake them. But she had brought them up to the roof, and hid them with the stalks of flax, which she had laid in order on the roof. The men pursued after them the way to the Jordan to the fords: and as soon as those who pursued after them were gone out, they shut the gate […] Then she let them down by a cord through the window: for her house was on the side of the wall, and she lived on the wall. (Joshua 2:1-15)
The same merciful saving woman, and by the same mean: the cord.
Karl Abraham has defined mythology as a collective dream (Dreams and Myths: A Study in Race Psychology, 1909).
As in dreams, the unconscious instinctual need is represented by repetitions [8]. Rahab, the prostuitute, is represented with a rope descending from her. She is a repetition of the city of Jericho which, as every city, symbolizes the woman. We have a double representation of the symbol of the woman: Rahab and Jericho, from the walls of which a rope hangs.
Furthermore, Karl Abraham has shown that in dreams a spider with a thread means a female genital with a penis (see note 3b).
The heroes descend the female penis, like the hero of Rapunzel ascended and descended the girl's tress. Inversions are very common in dreams: Ascending and descending are equivalent.



A female penis perceived as very dangerous by the rabbis




The Arts' Keeper in the Gemalde-Galerie (Berlin)


NOTES

[1] Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, (1921),  Postcript, Chap. XII B

[2] Nietzsche grasped the symbolism of the snake, or a dragon, as that of the female penis. As he says in Seven Epigrams on Woman : " Young: a cavern decked about. Old: a dragon sallies out." ( Beyond Good and Evil, 237)

On the snake as symbol of the missing female penis, see: Iakov Levi, “Biancaneve e alter vergini”, in<   http://www.psicoanalisi.it/psicoanalisi/osservatorio/articoli/osserva24.htm>, in Scienza e psicoanalisi. Rivista multimediale di psicoanalisi e scienze applicate [Entered  Sept. 8, 2002].

See also: Medusa, the Female Genital and the Nazis and Caravaggio and La Madonna del serpente

[3] S.Freud, "Introductory Lectures on Psycho - Analysis; Symbolism in Dreams", 1915 - 1917, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Ed. and Trans. J. Strachey, Hogarth Press, London 1964, Vol.XV,  p.153.

[3b] As confirmation of the rope as a penis' symbol, I quote from a book by Theodor Reik: "

A woman whose sexual life was unsatisfactory and who lived in an unhappy marriage began a psychoanalytic session with the words: 'I am at the end of my rope' ” ( The Need to Be Loved, Bantam Book, New York 1963, p.216). The woman unconsciously associated her sexual life with "rope".
Furthermore, Karl Abraham has shown that the spider is the symbol of the female genital. One of his patients dreamed of a spider with a thread, and he interpreted the dream as the repressed memory of the childish perception of a female genital with a penis ("The Spider as a Dream Symbol" (1922), in Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, Hogarth Press, London 1927, pp. 326-332). In this case too, the thread stays for the penis: a female member which is similar to the male's.

[4] In poetry, literature, and in matter of speech, we are used to compare life itself with a thread, which as pointed by Abraham (Supra), is a penis' symbol. Therefore, cutting that thread is equivalent to castration = death. Tom Wolfe, one of the greatest contemporary writers, says:

You still think you are going to live forever! And in fact, you are attached to your youth only by a thread, not a cord, not a cable, and that thread can snap at any moment, and it will snap soon in any case. And then where are you? ( A Man in Full, Macmillan, London 1998, p.156)

[5] S.Freud, "Introductory Lectures on Psycho - Analysis; Symbolism in Dreams", op.cit., p. 164.

[6] Karl Abraham, "An Infantile Sexual Theory not Hitherto Noted" (1925), in  Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, edited by Ernest Jones,
          translated by Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey, Hogart Press, London 1927,  pp. 334 -7.

[7] K.Abraham, “The Female Castration Complex" (1920), in op.cit, p.343.

[8] As stated by Theodor Reik: "the unconscious behaves like the ancient languages. Both express the importance and significance of a process by means of repetition" (The Puberty Rites of Savages", in Ritual, Farrar & Straus, New York 1946, p.140).

 

Links:

The Chariot of the Sun and the Messiah
Little Red Riding Hood
Girls' Desire for Incest in Myth and in the Bible
Superman and the Myth of the Heroes
Cinderella and "The Puss with the Boots"
The Three Little Pigs and Bruno Bettelheim. How not to make an interpretation


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