Naomi Stadlen on Hans Andersen's Nightingale

DEAR SIR,

Stephen Wilson's paper, 'Hans Anderson's Nightingale' (Int. Rev. Psychoanal. 7: 483–486), requires some comment as it seems to be based on an inadequate reading of the fairy story.

Dr Wilson's intention is to use the story to illustrate certain developments in the course of an analysis, according to the thought of Melanie Klein. He redefines the setting, so that the emperor represents the ego, the nightingale a good subject, and so on. In doing so, he alters the meaning, which allows him to make unjustified claims about the story.

His conclusion is that 'The tale illuminates the movement between paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions and highlights the meaning of trust in a good object'. The nearer he draws to his conclusion, the further he is from the story itself.

The divergence starts when Dr Wilson interprets that the emperor 'becomes prey to persecutory hallucinations'. This redefinition significantly alters and avoids the moral dilemma evoked by the original: strange faces looked down at the emperor … They were the evil and good deeds that the emperor had done.'

Dr Wilson continues by claiming that the emperor responds by being 'particularly tormented by his developing insight and by the things that he had never realised before that the voices tell him about. It seems that he is about to be overwhelmed by depressive anxiety.' The emperor is certainly tormented, but there is no evidence to suggest that he is 'developing insight' or realising things he didn't know before. On the contrary, his one response is to deny everything with the shout: '"No, no, I don't remember! It is not true!"' and then to beg for music '"So that I will not be able to hear what they are saying."'

At the close of the story, it would be wrong to imagine, as Dr Wilson does, that the emperor 'is now able to tolerate the knowledge of his evil deeds which were previously experienced as persecutory'. The emperor shows no sign of such a change and refers to the faces as