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This paper is an imaginative untangling of a psychodynamic aspect of folklore. Dr. Lilla Veszy-Wagner illuminates the process of an educational mythology which is useful to the adult as a way of unconsciously discharging his own unresolved tensions, and simultaneously, by inculcating fear of punishment for
those who disobey the harsh and rigid restrictions of adult law, indoctrinating permanent respect for the adult world in the “innocent” child.
I would dispute the existence of the author's conception of a specifically “European unconscious” as indicated in the opening paragraph of this paper. The validity of a universal unconscious seems well established to me, although socio-cultural differences may consciously heighten one aspect or another of pertinent myth or folklore. Wolf stories do exist in contemporary American, European, and Asian lore as well as the classical myths. The wolf appears to be one of the animals that man has used to symbolize the emotional gamut of our noble heights and base fears.
Miss Elizabeth Crawford (“American Imago,” Fall, 1955) wrote on “The Wolf As Condensation” and summarizes: “… The wolf as symbol is manifold, multiplex, protean. Man, in his ages-long relationships with the wolf, has made him so. Onto wolf, man has projected father, mother, danger, safety and rescue, evil and good, voraciousness and nurture, and the fascination and peril of his own sexuality. Only as man knows the wolf within him will he be free.”
Miss Crawford also calls attention to the excitement-fear axis of childhood sexual excitement and cites a passage from Nightwood by Djuna Barnes: The character Nora seeks the doctor at 3:00 A.M. and finds his room as “muscular as a boxer's training camp.” However, there are feminine articles of toiletry and lacy apparel about, and the doctor, sitting up in bed, has rouged cheeks and is wearing a long blond wig. Nora thinks, “God, children know something they can't tell; they like Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed