Iakov Levi



The Three Little Pigs and Bruno Bettelheim. How not to make an interpretation



Nov. 12, 2003.
(Modified on March 22, 2005)

For this must be clear to us, above everything else
(to our humiliation or ennoblement): the entire comedy of art does not present
itself for us in order to make us better or to educate us (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 5)


Bruno Bettelheim in The Three Little Pigs (Vintage Books, New York 1975), gives us a perfect example of how deeply Freudian psychoanalysis has been repressed in the last fifty years. When nobody knew of psychoanalysis, no one desperately tried to repress it. Tales were just tales, and no one murdered a tale using psychoanalytical tools that are not properly understood.
Children were still free of expressing their desires, drives, fears and feelings without the distorting interference of adults, who project into them their own philosophy of life.
Today, psychoanalytic jargon is used as an Ego - tool of defense, and as a legitimation for building up endless rationalizations.
Bettelheim writes:

"The Three Little Pigs" teaches the nursery age child in a most enjoyable and dramatic form that we must not be lazy and take things easy, for if we do, we may perish. Intelligent planning and foresight combined with hard labor will make us victorious over even our most ferocious enemy-the wolf! The story also shows the advantages of growing up, since the third and wisest pig is usually depicted as the biggest and the oldest (ibidem).
Tales are the expression of mental contents, the substance of which are unconscious drives, namely, repressed needs, emerging in the tale by circumvention of the censorship of the Ego. They do not teach, they express a sentiment. Just like dreams and oeuvres of art.
A tales is not a political manifesto.

Bettelheim writes:
The houses the three pigs built are symbolic of man's progress in history: from a lean-to shack to a wooden house, finally to a house of solid brick. Internally, the pigs' actions show progress from the dominated personality to the superego-influenced but essentially ego-controlled personality. (op.cit)
Dreams, works of art, and tales are the expression of unconscious needs. They have no moral intentions, nor educational purposes. Symbolism is not finalist. It is the product of drives and conflicts emerging in a condensed and concealed way, with the purpose of expressing a psychic content, and of discharging the energies trapped in the repression, that are pressing for recognition and for relief. Nietzsche underlined the equivalence between dreams and works of art: "We use up too much artistry in our dreams -and therefore often are impoverished during the day" ("The Wanderer and His Shadow", in II Human, All Too Human, 194).
Every repression implies an accumulation of energies which, being inhibited from discharging, results in a certain amount of sufferance.
Symbols, at difference with metaphors and allegories, are the containers of very concrete needs, namely instinctual drives. Through symbols, dreams, tales, and works of arts express the need, and in this way they relieve the sufferance by discharging the energies trapped in the repression (1); (see Truth Is a Woman: Bernini - Giorgione - Manet).
Moreover, like in dreams and in art, there is no "progress". Nor the dreamer or the story-teller, who are one, know anything about Ego or Super - Ego, and other complicated concepts, that Bettelheim mentions out of context.
But Bettelheim feels more secure using the tale as an instrument for exposing his own philosophy of life which, as every philosophy, is an Ego overlay, built up by adults eager of repressing childhood's psychic contents and drives: it is a tool of denial.

How a tale is to be approached ?

Simply and to the point.
Freud has shown that the number three is the symbol of the male genital: the penis (2).
Therefore, three little pigs are a penis.
This penis is threatened by a wolf, which in all tales, as in Little Red Riding Hood, Peter and the Wolf, The Wolf and the Seven Kids and other stories, is an obvious paternal imago, namely, the castrating Father.
The house is the symbol of the maternal body (3), that the Oedipal child craves to possess. Shakespeare confirms to us that lust for a house and lust for a woman are equivalent:

Falstaff: Of what quality was your love, then?
Ford: Like a fair house built upon another man's ground; so that I have lost my edifice by mistaking the place where I erected it.
( Merry Wives of Windsor, Act II - Scene II)

The tale expresses the genital drive toward the mother (the house), and the castration's terror of the little child, which, having been repressed, are pressing for recognition.
The climax is reached when the little pig overcomes the Father (4), and keeps his own penis intact, with the assistance of the mother.
Exactly as in the myths of the Heroes, from Zeus - Rhea to Theseus - Ariadne and many more, where they kill the Father - substitute, and keep the woman for themselves (in Theseus' myth the paternal imago is represented by the Minotaur, the Totemic Beast). Usually, archaic Heroes overcome the Father with the help of the woman (the Mother or her substitute), sometimes she keeps waiting in the sidelines until the fight is over, but the story is the same story.


NOTES

(1) Cf. Sigmund Freud:

art offers substitutive satisfactions for the oldest and still most deeply felt cultural renunciations, and for that reason it serves as nothing else does to reconcile a man to the sacrifices he has made on behalf of civilization ("The Future of an Illusion" (1927), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, The Hogarth Press, London 1953, Vol. 21, p.14).
And again:
Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility. The task here is that of shifting the instinctual aims in such a way that they cannot come up against frustration from the external world. In this, sublimation of the instincts lends its assistance (in op.cit. p.79).

(2) "Symbolism in Dreams", in "Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis" (1915-1917) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Ed. and Trans. J. Strachey, Hogarth Press, London 1964, Vol.XV, pp.163-4.

In order to understand how a Persona represents his own member, we must remember that in our unconscious we make a personification of a drive, and particularly of the member representing it.
On the personification that patients do of the male's penis, Reik writes:
Many women call the penis �he�, personifying the male genital organ and attributing to it a life of its own, independent of the man. Some women give the penis a special name. A patient whose husband had the name Charles called his penis �Carlos�. Another woman addressed the penis as �Master�, thus differentiating �him� from its owner whom he called �Mister� (The Need to Be Loved, Bantam Book, New York 1963, p.256).
In the same book, I encountered an interesting sentence:
Men experience such revivals of old experiences they thought buried long ago and find themselves burning in a fire they had imagined extinguished for many years: The erections they have are resurrections (op.cit., p.131).
On the full identification between the heroes of the tales and their penis, see Hamlet. The Puberty Rite of a Danish Prince and His Companions.

Now, we can also better understand Freud�s induction drawing an equivalence between death and castration. Freud has shown that Eros� impulses (Trieb), equivalent to life � conservation, are antithetic to the death � urge (Todestrieb), which is the primary impulse, tending to restore again the inorganic condition preceding life. I can add that if death is an urge (Trieb), death anxiety is, as every anxiety, a mechanism of defense against the recurrence of such an urge.
Furthermore, the most advanced psycho sexual stage of life (Eros) is indeed the genital level, which in his primal genuine form is expressed as erections towards the object of love.
As Reik has hinted, erections are resurrections, namely a lack of erections, which is unconsciously perceived as castration, is equivalent to a sensation of death.
At this point, we easily reconnect to the substance of death anxiety. The fear of death is no other than the well known dread of castration. It is indeed peculiar to humans, who harbor the archaic dread of retaliation for their aggressive castration impulses toward the father of the primal horde. The more the child is unable to overcome his instinctual castration anxiety - due to hostile onto genetic conditions, the more, as an adult, he will suffer from death anxiety.

The note has been last modified Oct. 22, 2005.

(3) S.Freud, Op.cit. pp. 162 -3.

(4). The wolf, like the Minotaur, and every other menacing and ferocious beast, are the typical symbols of the paternal imago. As Freud writes: "The hero was a man who by himself had slain the father - the father who still appeared in the myth as a totemic monster" (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Postscript XII(B)).

Furthermore, on the wolf as a paternal imago, cf. Sigmund Freud in "Repression" (1915):
From the field of anxiety hysteria I will chose a well analyze example of animal phobia [Freud refers to the case history of the 'Wolf Man']. The instinctual impulse subjected to repression here is a libidinal attitude towards the father, coupled with fear of him. After repression, this impulse vanishes out of consciousness: the father does not appear in it as an object of libido. As a substitute for him we find in a corresponding place some animal which is more or less fitted to be an object of anxiety . The formation of the substitute for the ideational portion [of the instinctual representative] has come about by displacement along a chain of connections which is determined in a particular way. The quantitative portion has not vanished, but has been transformed into anxiety. The result is fear of a wolf, instead of a demand for love from the father (In op.cit, Vol. XIV, p.155)

Theodor Reik, in his brilliant essay "The Shofar", in which he analyzes the psychoanalytic roots of the ritual horn in Judaism, writes:
The fear of a bull or goat in the phobias of children, where the anxiety is based on the thought of the horn by which the child fears to be tossed. May be compared with little Hans' fear of being bitten by a horse. The essential root of these infantile ideas is unconscious castration anxiety. It is fully in accordance with unconscious mental life that the instrument by which castration is carried out should be the father's penis (in the unconscious fantasies of children an operation on their own penis is also carried out by the paternal genital) (in Ritual:Psychoanalytic Studies, Farrar & Straus, New York 1946, p.262).



Links:

Truth Is a Woman: Bernini - Giorgione - Manet
Pinocchio: The Puberty Rite of a Puppet
Pinocchio and the Cult of the Trees
Cinderella and "The Puss with the Boots"
Little Red Riding Hood
Three Women: the Penis
The Prodigal Son by Arturo Martini


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