On the Fringe of the Oedipal Narrative, the Fairy Tale. Marie Bonnafé-Villechenoux, pp.  787-800.

The author focuses on the often-emphasized connection between dreams, fairy tales, and psychoanalytic discoveries. A fairy story or folktale may supply the dream with myths and folklore and has symbolic meanings. These stories and tales, so apparently transparent and clear, are screens offering the pleasant surprise of hidden content. In the same fashion, dreams are revelations of that which escapes from consciousness, issuing from infantile sexuality, and which cannot be grasped except in crystallization upon waking—as a dream narrative, in text and images, like a hieroglyph or a rebus, masking and transforming the nocturnal dream material. As in dreams, such stories are transformed into a narrative account. A close analogy exists between the narrative of the dream and the narrative of a popular story. Each provides modes for the appearances of unconscious contents.

Bonnafé-Villechenoux's clinical experience has been in the use of such material as it appears in analyses of psychosomatic patients in particular. Treatment with these patients is often a process dominated by libidinal viscosity, inertia, repetitions, and negativity— for example, in patients with the symptom of recto-colon hemorrhage. Yet a reference during sessions to a mythical story or a fairy tale may initiate progress in the analysis. The author's claim is that the construction and content of these stories place their time of origin after nursery rhymes and the care of wetnurses, and thus at a key moment: at the threshold of entry into the oedipal period, a moment that repeats itself psychodynamically throughout