Fairy Tales and the Social Unconscious

The Hidden Language

Ravit Raufman, Haim Weinberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429913549
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

The book combines two main perspectives: the study of the social unconscious and the study of fairy tales. Examining different versions of fairy tales told by different ethnic communities teaches us about the relations between universal and local/cultural aspects of the social unconscious. Exploring the unique status of fairy tales as located on the border line between concrete/somatic and abstract/linguistic realms sheds light on different levels of the human mind. The book focuses on a specific phenomenon common in fairy tales: a realization of idiomatic expressions - a phenomenon in which an abstract/mental idea is hidden behind a concrete event embedded in the plot. Deciphering the abstract idea out of the pictorial world of the fairy tale enables to understand the stories in a way which is not available otherwise. The book suggests interdisciplinary examination, reminding us the rich, deep messages hidden in fairy tales, and connecting us to early developments in the field of psychoanalysis, by suggesting new interpretation to old, ancient material.

CHAPTER ONE
"Giving one's heart" and "speaking from the bottom of the heart": the case of the Jewish mother in Eastern European tales^*

Let us start with an Israeli–Jewish joke: Children in school were asked to compose an essay using the phrase “There is only one Mom”. Danny wrote, “I returned home from school and asked Mom what is there to eat. She replied that there are two apples in the refrigerator. I opened the fridge and shouted, ‘There is only one, Mom’.”

This joke, whose special function in the Jewish–Israeli society will be discussed later, hints at the struggle between society’s expectation of acknowledging the centrality of mothers in their sons’ lives and the sons’ protest against this oppressive exclusiveness. Cumulative psychoanalytic knowledge emphasizes the centrality of the mother figure in the early development of the infant. Usually, this period is considered non-verbal; however, we have already pointed out (Raufman & Yigael, 2011) that language is already embedded in primary levels of mental organization. In this chapter, we present the parallelism between the primary level of mental organization (in which the figure of the mother is central) and the mother–son relationship as presented in fairy tales. Analyzing fairy tales dealing with the mother–son relationship, we focus on both content and form: the early relationships presented in the tales are in line with the unique form of language used in the narrative, which echoes primary modes of thinking. The realization of two idiomatic expressions that include the word “heart” helps in learning about this mode of experience. As mentioned in our introduction, fairy tales, which are part of the foundation matrix, are located on the border between the abstract and the concrete, and the phenomenon of realization of idiomatic expressions is part of their hidden language. The more universal/somatic aspect of this phenomenon (to which the individual is exposed at birth, before being inaugurated into culture and language) is in an ongoing interaction with the socio-cultural aspect of a specific ethnic community.

In this chapter, we focus on the folk tales’ tradition of East-European Jews and how it reflects aspects of mother–son relationships as they function in their foundation matrix.

"The talking heart"

The tale “The talking heart” is recorded in the Israeli Folktale Archive (IFA) and was told by Jews who arrived in Israel from Eastern Europe. Various Jewish versions of this tale are recorded in the archive, all presenting a similar motif, with the following plot: A Jewish man proposes marriage to his beloved. The maiden is willing to marry her beloved suitor, but only on condition that he brings her his mother’s heart. Her lover agrees, and takes his mother’s heart out of her body. On his way to his lover, carrying his mother’s heart, he falls. The heart speaks to the son, despite having been excised from the mother’s body. Worried, it asks the son, “Are you hurt? Are you all right?”

Two concrete actions which appear in the tale can be understood as a realization of idiomatic expressions: The mother who gives her heart to her son is the realization of the idiom “to give a heart”, and the talking heart is the realization of the idiom “to speak from the heart”. Both idioms appear in many languages, as well as in Yiddish, the language spoken among Eastern-European Jews. The metaphorical meaning of these idioms, hidden behind concrete actions in the plot, is in line with the basic idea expressed in the tale, which relates to the particular, unique relationship between a mother and a son. The way of expressing these deep ideas (using concrete actions instead of symbolic verbal expression), which is related to primary thought processes, is also associated with this unique, early, primary relationship between mothers and children. Hence, the theme of a primary, endless mother’s love attains an additional meaning by using a mode of expression that combines concrete and abstract layers of consciousness. The idiom “To speak from the bottom of the heart” refers to honesty and is associated with the ability to put deep emotions into words, and, therefore, hints at the relation between somatic and mental–linguistic aspects in the human mind. These idiomatic expressions, which do not appear overtly in the tale, but are, rather, presented as concrete acts, can evoke the deepest, early, primary emotions, as well as somatic experiences emerging from early developmental stages. The choice to express the abstract idea via a concrete act amplifies the physical sensation and the affinity between the somatic and the mental.

Neither the act of taking out the mother’s heart nor the ability of the heart to talk is related to ordinary life. In order to understand them we need to take into consideration aspects that do not necessarily appear on the overt plot level of the story. Apparently, the bride-to-be’s request expresses jealousy of her future mother-in-law, as she wishes to take the mother’s place in her lover’s heart. Even though this kind of jealousy might be familiar in families, the expression of it in this specific, extreme, cruel form, which we do not expect to find in reality, requires explanation. Why was this particular strange act chosen, again and again, in different times and versions of this tale? What mode of experience might it reflect?

In contrast to many other fairy tales, the central relationship in the narrative is not between the suitor and his beloved, but, rather, between the son and his mother. This becomes clear at the end of the story, as the bride-to-be is not even mentioned, only the mother, who keeps talking to her son from her heart. We should understand these two mythological acts in the context of the relationship between concrete and abstract modes of experience.

The Jewish mother's self-sacrifice ("To give one's heart")

In daily language, the expression “to give one’s heart” is used in order to describe a situation in which we are willing to give everything to someone for whom we care. This is the most total giving, dedicated to the most beloved one. In all of the Jewish versions, the mother does not rebel against the son’s request and is willing to give her heart. Her love is portrayed as total and exclusive, and characterizes only a certain type of relationship—the love between a mother and a son.

In contrast to the son, who is ready to replace the mother with his future bride, the mother never stops loving her son and never displaces her love toward him, even after her death. This is an endless, total love, which crosses any border, including the boundary separating life and death. Strong relations between mothers and sons are not unique to Jewish folklore. Similar stereotypes also exist in other cultures (such as the Mediterranean mother, the Pacha Mama in the Inca mythology, and others). However, in this chapter, we focus on the way in which a cross-cultural phenomenon attains a specific form in the Jewish folk tradition, in which the mother is presented as self-sacrificing.

Many of the Jewish versions of this tale were told by the female figures of the families (mothers, grandmothers) who told them to their sons, or grandsons. From this point of view, the tales may be perceived as didactic, aiming to teach the males in the family that nothing compares to mother’s love. This is an intricate message, as, along with demonstrating the warm, total love of the mother, the tales warn against vicious brides and hint that the only safe place in the world is the mother. On the overt plot level, the bride is portrayed as bad and evil. However, as most of the story-tellers are mothers, these versions could be exposing and reflecting the potential jealousy of the mother (and not the bride) who fears that a new, young, pretty lady will take her place. The story-tellers use a rhetorical trick by presenting the mother in the story as an innocent, all-good figure who cares only for her son’s wellbeing. Her negative feelings are not described on the overt level, but are rather exposed by enacting a narrative technique of portraying the bride’s figure as evil and cruel. In contrast to the mother and son, who are presented as innocent and good, the bride is egocentric and manipulative. In order to replace the mother by another love object, some emotional surgery is necessary. Thus, we can view the cruelty characteristic of the primary thought processes expressed in the act of taking out the mother’s heart as a metaphor for this surgery. Just as the father’s role in the oedipal stage is to help to sever the symbiosis of mother and son, the bride’s role later in life is to continue this separation process.

The mother in this tale personifies nourishing, protecting, and threatening aspects of mothering and its reverse aspect—smothering. Idealizations and exaggerations are always included because of primary levels of mental organization that remain, or become reactivated, during later phases of development of psychic life.

An additional complexity of the messages in the tale is related to the mother who is presented as a victim. The relationship between mother and son is not full of joy and happiness. Instead, the main characteristic is the fact that she is happily willing to die for him. This kind of mother might evoke in her son feelings of guilt and regret. When requested by her son to take some rest from work, a typical sentence attributed to the Jewish mother is, “I shall rest in my grave”. Her “love” could cause him to feel entrapped and to prevent him from creating new relationships with other women. Still, we should ask why this specific, strange, concrete act was chosen in order to express this idea. We suggest that the answer lies in exploring the relation between concrete and abstract layers of the mind, and by discussing the status of the heart as an internal organ, and the way in which it operates in the linguistic realm with its appearance in an idiomatic expression in a way that might evoke and revive early sensations emerging from a primary developmental phase in life.

Idiomatic expressions that include the word "heart"

Various idiomatic expressions of different languages include the word “heart”. Among them we can mention the idioms “broken heart”, “eat one’s heart out”, “a heavy heart”, and many others. As mentioned in the Introduction, McDougall brings a clinical example in which she connected a wish of a patient named “Tim” to be heartless to his physical problem with his heart muscle. McDougall referred specifically to different levels of concretization and symbolization related to symptoms (McDougall, 1998). Only after a while, after this patient had suffered from a myocardial infarction, she understood that the idiomatic expression “to be heartless” is not just metaphoric and could carry tragic somatic implications. McDougall views somatizations as a metaphoric expression of a mental disorder, appearing when ordinary mental coping collapses.

In the Jewish versions of the tale “The talking heart”, the heart serves precisely these two realms: the concrete and the abstract. On the concrete level, the moment you take a heart out of someone’s body, it causes death. However, the way in which the heart keeps functioning, vocalizing the mother’s concerns even after her death, demonstrates the use of the heart in the narrative on the metaphoric level. The first concrete act (taking the heart out of the body) is possible in reality (even though very cruel). The second act (the heart keeps talking) is unrealistic and is possible only in the fictional world of fairy tales. The talking heart can be understood as rebelling against the rules of nature and of life and death. It removes any barrier between the living and the dead and, therefore, any barrier that might exist between the mother and her son. In a world of wishful thinking and fantasies, as in the world of fairy tales, this is possible. The mothers telling these stories to their sons use this content to describe how endless and boundless their love is. They also indirectly hint that, no matter what, they would never free their sons.

Mother—son relationships

There is a grain of truth in the mothers’ fears that young women will one day take their place. In normal development, sons would indeed separate one day and leave their families in order to build a new family with a new woman. Psychoanalytic literature dealing with mother–child relationships and with the process of separation distinguishes between sons and daughters’ development. While daughters’ growth and choosing a male partner, as well as the achievement of their gender identity, do not require separation from the mother, achieving a masculine identity necessarily involves cutting the apron strings (a metaphor for the umbilical cord) and distancing from the mother and everything that is identified with feminine qualities.

Chodorow (1978, 1989, 1999) provides a significant contribution to understanding this process. Contrary to the traditional psychoanalytic model, she claims that differences between boys and girls stem not only from the oedipal period, but also from the pre-oedipal experience. She states,

. . . through relation to the mother, women develop a self-in-relation, men a self that denies relatedness . . . in most cultures, the earliest identity for all children is feminine, because women are around them . . . such identification is more threatening to the boy, because [it is] more basic, than the elements of masculine identification that a little girl later acquires.

(Chodorow, 1989, pp. 15, 36)

Chodorow also states that men’s way of overcoming the dread of women is by devaluing every feminine aspect in their psyche, including the expression of feelings and relating to others. This description might provide a possible explanation for the longing of both mother and son for the early period of union, since, once the son grows up, he tends to deny his deep connection to the mother. This situation differs for the girl, whose relationship with the mother is not experienced as being threatening; hence, she does not have to separate from her mother in order to achieve gender identity or to fall in love with a man. As Chodorow puts it, “. . . they [girls] are brought up primarily by women, their socialization is fairly gradual and continuous in most societies, the female role is more accessible and understandable to the child . . .” (Chodorow, 1989, p. 40).

Benjamin has helped to advance the exploration of the role of the mother in the developmental process of achieving gender identity. She discusses the conflict involved in the mother–son separation process. She states,

the boy does not merely disidentify with the mother, he repudiates her and all feminine attributes. The incipient split between the mother as a source of “all goodness” and the father as the principle of individuation is hardened into a polarity in which the mother’s goodness is reconceptualized as a seductive threat to autonomy. Thus, a paternal ideal of separation is formed, which, under the current gender arrangement, comes to embody the repudiation of femininity.

(Benjamin, 1988, pp. 135–136)

It seems as if traditionally, for Jewish men, this struggle of the son to establish his masculine identity and differentiate from his mother is particularly difficult and clearly reflected in the stereotype of the Jewish mother and the Jewish folktale tradition.

The tales told by the mothers in the family do not ignore this reality. They present a normative situation in respect to the son’s preference. The aspect that is not normative is the way by which the events unfold. From this point of view, the expression “to speak from the heart” describes not only honesty, but also the exact place in which the internal realm is salient and governs the situation. Reality is perceived as harsh and unbearable from the point of view of the mother who refuses to let her son go. At the same time, the mother cannot change this reality. The only solution, therefore, is taken from both the unrealistic realm (the heart which continues talking after the mother dies) and the symbolic realm (the functioning of the heart in an idiomatic expression, reflecting very deep emotions). It is possible that the concrete act of the talking heart demonstrates how the affinity between mother and son is, first and foremost, a physical affinity, preceding the development of other complex emotions, such as love. This affinity is created right after the mother becomes pregnant and the baby is an integral part of her body and not a separate entity. Even after birth, the physical component is salient in the mother–son relationship, as she breastfeeds, holds, and cleans her baby. Very often, she experiences her baby as a part of her body long after birth, perhaps throughout her entire life. From this perspective, it is no wonder that, in such an archaic genre as fairy tales, which are characterized by magical and fantastic elements, the mother’s love is described in physical terms, as she gives her heart to her son in the most concrete manner. In the same way as the baby experiences the world in somatic terms, so does the mother, while being equipped with what Winnicott calls “primary maternal pre-occupation” (Winnicott, 1957). Even though the mother also has other modes of experience, she shares with her baby primary experiences related to the world of senses and sensations. The son’s future bride cannot give him her heart, or take his, as this act is reserved only to the unique relationship between mothers and sons.

We should remember that one of the main distinctions that the individual has to learn is between himself/herself and the mother, which is actually the basis for the differentiation between self and others. Various theoreticians have related to the separation from the mother’s body as a critical stage, in which the ability of symbolization is developed. Most of the psychoanalytic approaches assume that the early experiences of the baby consist of “me” and “not me” components. In the early stages of life, the baby perceives himself/herself and the environment as one entity, with no differentiation. The process that leads to the differentiation between me and not me and between fantasy and reality is called in psychoanalysis “symbolization”, and it is a central process in mental life. The language is important here, as it creates a mediation space between subject and object. It enables words instead of concrete objects.

In the Jewish versions of the tale “the talking heart”, the concrete meaning of the heart and the symbolic meaning of the word “heart” meet in an interesting manner. The relations between abstract and concrete levels are presented in both the thematic level of the tale (as the story deals with the primary mother–son relationship and with the mother’s fear of losing her son to another woman) and the poetic level, by using a plot detail which can be understood as a realization of an idiomatic expression familiar to the society in which the story is told, transmitted, and preserved.

The Jewish mother and the question of national character

Several studies of the national character were published in the middle of the twentieth century (e.g., Benedict, 1947; Gooch et al., 1945; Gorer, 1948, 1949), but almost disappeared later and were considered psychological reductionism until recently. Robins (2005) discusses reasons why national stereotypes are inaccurate, as well as broader issues concerning individual and cultural sources of variati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• Dedication
• SERIES EDITOR'S FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE "Giving one's heart" and "speaking from the bottom of the heart": the case of the Jewish mother in Eastern European tales
• CHAPTER TWO "Asked for her hand" and the tales about the handless maiden: how is taking the hand associated with a marriage proposal?
• CHAPTER THREE "Living in her skin": social skin-ego and the maiden who enters others' skins in fairy tales
• CHAPTER FOUR Eyes and envy: reading Grimms' One-eye, Two-eyes and Three-eyes and its Jewish parallels
• CHAPTER FIVE "I (do not) see what you mean": the concrete and metaphoric dimensions of blindness in fairy tales and the social mind
• CHAPTER SIX "To step into someone's shoes": the tales about Cinderella
• CHAPTER SEVEN Fire of lust: passion and greed in fairy tales and the social (un)conscious
• CHAPTER EIGHT "To eat a crow" (swallow frogs): a story of decrees and humiliation
• EPILOGUE
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX