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Through the cases of a few self-styled Little Red Riding Hoods (subsequently referred to as LRRH) who were in analysis with me, I became interested in the analytical implications of this widespread motif in folklore. There seems to be no particularly relevant folkloristic material available to this story outside Europe so we may infer that problems pertaining to this tale seem to be more connected with the unconscious of the European mind.
In analytic practice, I soon learned that LRRH is an important story often referred to in dreams, memories or associations; yet analysts seem to have given thoughts only to three of its many psychologically important facets.
The first is the motif of the filling the wolf's belly with stones, after LRRH and grannie are removed. Freud's relevant passage(1) on infantile sexual theories refers to it pointblank: “… the abdomen is slit up and the baby taken out—which was what happened to the wolf in the story of LRRH.” One may add that the wolf in the LRRH story suffers a “caesarean” and her twins are respectively LRRH and her grannie. M. Wulff (8) mentions a girl of eight who, afraid her abdomen will be slit open, nonetheless hopes the huntsman will shoot the aggressor eventually.
E. Fromm (5) contends that the wolf “attempted to play the role of a pregnant woman … Stones are a symbol of sterility, they mock his usurpation of the pregnant woman's role. The huntsman at the end is the conventional father figure without real weight … it is a story of triumph by man-hating women.” I will later return to this point.
The second important facet mentioned by analysts is Freud's theory about the Angsttiere (anxiety animals), but he nowhere states that the wolf, as one, should be given special relevance, and he deals only with that one feature of the wolf in the infantile fantasy—that it is an anxiety animal representing the child's fear of the father. Any other aggressive male or masculine-looking animal would do.
The third feature is aptly describe