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It is always a challenge to an author to develop new themes from old materials, and it is a pleasure to the reader if the author succeeds. Dr. Veszy-Wagner, using a Kleinian frame of reference to understand the three cases she presents, makes a good case for extending the ordinary clinical meanings of the Little Red Riding Hood story. Relying on her clinical data, she shows how preoedipal elements are essential to a full understanding of the story. By looking very deeply into latent meanings of the story, she points out that an exclusively oedipal interpretation is narrow. This is her main point, and one which, in this instance, seems wise.
Probably a fuller and more complete understanding of the story rests on a combination of
oedipal and preoedipal elements. Oedipal elements might include wolf = father = the sexual tempter; big eyes, ears, hands, teeth = big penis of father; and the wolf in bed with grandmother's clothes = fusion of male and female in the parental bed together. Preoedipal elements might include wolf = mother; bigness of wolf = bigness of mother when heroine was a baby; wolf dressed in the grandmother's clothes = phallic mother.
The story is very rich in symbolism and lends itself to many different interpretations. For example, if one saw the whole story as a dream and applied methods of dream interpretation (a technique which is very useful in understanding fairy tales, children's stories, etc.), one might see all the characters in the story as representing the dreamer: the wolf would represent sexual temptation and cannibalistic desires (the id) which must be killed off by the punishing huntsman (the superego) in order that the small child (the ego) will not be consumed and overwhelmed.
One might take issue with certain minor points, which I felt needed further elaboration: (a) The author feels the unconscious of the European mind is different from the unconscious of the non-European mind—it is perhaps more correct to say that the derivatives of