PART II - The Image as Artifact - The Cultural Evidence
Frontispiece

Horne is absolutely right in saying that the traditional methods of objective 'natural' science are incapable of dealing directly with subjective experience and its meaning. He defined 'mind' as the 'meaning of behaviour'. (In Guntrip, 1968: 367)

Jung wrote, "The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life ..."
By listening to the inner voice, which manifested itself in dreams, fantasies, and other spontaneous derivatives of the unconscious, the lost soul could rediscover its proper path. (Storr, 1990: 193)

Infants have always learned about life from tales heard at their mother's knee.

For Bruno Bettelheim (1978) Little Red Riding Hood is a symbolic account of the oedipal dangers a girl faces at puberty and of how she survives them with her father's, not her mother's help. My readers, I hope, will now be able to identify the wolf as devouring infantile rage (or the orally aggressive baby) and the grandmother as an 'old' baby ego-fragment. As the 'wise old woman' at the outset of the story, she had indicated the value of being open about anger by her gift of the red cap. The adapted-child heroine however still fails to recognise her own anger, aroused against maternal instructions and, while disobeying, directs it inwards towards her aged infantile self by telling the wolf how to find grandmother's cottage. She is swallowed up in her turn, but the rescue of both unharmed from the regressive womb-belly reassures the listener that their anger will not destroy either self or others. Bettelheim sees the hunter, who uses scissors (a very feminine tool) to cut open the wolf (the seducer, the id), as the rescuing aspect of father. For me this tale is of particular interest in showing the non-pathological use of the anti-libidinal, the scissors, by the assertive, therefore culturally masculine, part-ego.

Of course, the wolf had to die in the end because the right to be angry has always been denied to children.