You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
LRRH, as a fairy tale, provides a natural thematic apperception test which invites and has received a wide variety of interpretations, almost any of which may claim a certain degree of validity. Nevertheless the story itself, viewed as a sequence of preconscious images, communicates its own message which we shall undertake to translate (with no great variance from other translations that have been made) as follows:
“The pubescent girl, at the time of menstruation, defies her mother's warnings and enters into conversation with a strange man who accosts her. Taken to his room [which fuses in her unconscious with the bedroom of her parents], she inspects his body and is consumed sexually [just as mother has been by father]. There follows [foreshortened in time] a pregnancy and delivery. However, a denial element is registered at this point: not the girl but the ‘wolf’ becomes pregnant while she is delivered from his body by a good man, the hunter. The wolf, justly enough, succumbs to the perils of the pregnancy he has engendered.”
There is a great confluescence of childhood sex fantasies here, and we have little reason to cavil at diverse interpretations. That transference aspects in relation to a female analyst (Dr. Veszy-Wagner) will intensify the preoedipal and bisexual aspects of the wolf need not surprise us. I also find some support for Dr. Fromm's suggestion that there is an allusion to the inability of the male wolf to bear children. With the aid of the well-known equation, stones = feces, we find that he cannot, after all, convert his feces into children.
LRRH belongs to a group of fairy tales with similar connotations—“Snow White” “Sleeping Beauty,” etc.—which are nature myths that describe death, resurrection and fertility in relation to the seasons. A female version of the Oedipus legend may be discerned in the encounter of LRRH with the wolf; however, allowing for the differences in sex, it is the heroine who discovers that it is dangerous to ask too many que