ART AND ANXIETY
317
Richard Wright in which he uncovered some unconscious determi–
nants of the material in
Native Son.
In trying to judge the extent to
which artists do consciously shape their material, we should notice
Dr. Wertham's report that "the root experiences intimately related
to the key scene of the novel were unavailable to his consciousness at
the time of the novel and at the beginning of our experiment when
he reflected on the sources of his inspiration for the creation of the
Dalton household," and that "comparison of the long-forgotten mem–
ories presented in this study with the self-explanation of
N alive Son
in 'How Bigger Was Born' show the latter is a conscious rationali–
zation."
Both
Native Son
and Little Red Riding Hood may be compared
to what Miss Sharpe calls the "cautionary tale." A simple example
is:
If
you go into the jungle, a lion may eat you. This seems too sim–
ple. After all, lions do eat people, and a child may pleasantly excite
himself with thoughts of such a remote danger. But we know what
a lion meant in the case of little Hans, reported by Freud and later
discussed by Anna Freud in her book
The Ego and the Mechanism of
Defense.
In his fantasies little Hans was attended by a tame lion,* very
fierce in demeanor. When grown-ups of his acquaintance first saw
it, they were terrified, but their terror changed to wonder when they
found the beast completely submissive to Hans's command. Although
Hans was not aware of the connection, tracing down associational
patterns made it clear that the lion v,ras his father, and that the fan–
tasy gave relief by letting Hans imagine himself in complete control
of a person whose behavior actually filled him with confusion and
anxiety. And
if
we assign "jungle" or "bush" its usual meaning in
Freudian symbolism, the cautionary sentence,
"If
you go in the jungle
a lion will eat you," may be read as a threat from the father in an
Oedipal situation.
This assigning of symbolic or derived value to events in outer
reality that appear to have their own quite adequate tensions and
excitements becomes far more plausible if we consider the way chil–
dren are brought up in our civilization. In the early years parents
intervene at all points in children's experience of the outer world.
Prolonged battles, full of emotion on both sides, go on over feeding
and toilet training. A child is taught to avoid situations of danger,
*
I find that, writing from memory, I combined two of Miss Freud's cases.
Hans' father became a horse. Another little boy tamed the lion, but the point is
the
same.
