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The story of Snow White has become very popular at the present day, largely on acount of the film version made by Walt Disney, and it seems worth while to enquire into the hidden meanings of the fairytale with some of the insight given by psychoanalysis. Snow White belongs to a group of folk-tales collected by the brothers Grimm in Germany in the first half of last century. These tales had been handed on orally from one generation to another because adults, as tellers, and children, as listeners, were both interested in them and enjoyed them, just as we like the story and film to-day. Since the Grimms published their collections, the stories have been translated into a great number of other languages, and enjoyed by all kinds of people in different countries.
The appeal of these stories to so many different personalities means that they must have reached in their evolution a very generalised form. They must have become adapted to appeal to widely differing people, and any particular story, such as Snow White, must relate a human experience so widespread that it can be appreciated by people of different generations, nationalities, ages and social classes. It must provide an outlet for or arouse a great number of different fantasies, so that people may have satisfaction in it according to their individual needs.1 Hence this article presents only a certain group of possible interpretations.
A joke does not remain in static form, but varies as it passes from