Freud - Complete Works (437 page)

   I shall discuss on another
occasion the explanation of these animal phobias and the
significance attaching to them. I will only remark in anticipation
that this explanation is in complete harmony with the principal
characteristic shown by the neurosis from which the present dreamer
suffered later in his life. His fear of his father was the
strongest motive for his falling ill, and his ambivalent attitude
towards every father-surrogate was the dominating feature of his
life as well as of his behaviour during the treatment.

   If in my patient’s case the
wolf was merely a first father-surrogate, the question arises
whether the hidden content in the fairy tales of the wolf that ate
up the little goats and of ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’ may
not simply be infantile fear of the father.¹ Moreover, my
patient’s father had the characteristic, shown by so many
people in relation to their children, of indulging in
‘affectionate abuse’; and it is possible that during
the patient’s earlier years his father (though he grew severe
later on) may more than once, as he caressed the little boy or
played with him, have threatened in fun to ‘gobble him
up’. One of my patients told me that her two children could
never get to be fond of their grandfather, because in the course of
his affectionate romping with them he used to frighten them by
saying he would cut open their tummies.

  
¹
Compare the similarity between these two
fairy tales and the myth of Kronos, which has been pointed out by
Rank (1912).

2602

THE THEME OF THE THREE CASKETS

(1913)

2603

Intentionally left blank

2604

THE THEME OF THE THREE CASKETS

I

Two scenes from Shakespeare, one from a comedy
and the other from a tragedy, have lately given me occasion for
posing and solving a small problem.

   The first of these scenes is the
suitors’ choice between the three caskets in
The Merchant
of Venice
. The fair and wise Portia is bound at her
father’s bidding to take as her husband only that one of her
suitors who chooses the right casket from among the three before
him. The three caskets are of gold, silver and lead: the right
casket is the one that contains her portrait. Two suitors have
already departed unsuccessful: they have chosen gold and silver.
Bassanio, the third, decides in favour of lead; thereby he wins the
bride, whose affection was already his before the trial of fortune.
Each of the suitors gives reasons for his choice in a speech in
which he praises the metal he prefers and depreciates the other
two. The most difficult task thus falls to the share of the
fortunate third suitor; what he finds to say in glorification of
lead as against gold and silver is little and has a forced ring. If
in psycho-analytic practice we were confronted with such a speech,
we should suspect that there were concealed motives behind the
unsatisfying reasons produced.

   Shakespeare did not himself
invent this oracle of the choice of a casket; he took it from a
tale in the
Gesta Romanorum
, in which a girl has to make the
same choice to win the Emperor’s son.¹ Here too the
third metal, lead, is the bringer of fortune. It is not hard to
guess that we have here an ancient theme, which requires to be
interpreted, accounted for and traced back to its origin. A first
conjecture as to the meaning of this choice between gold, silver
and lead is quickly confirmed by a statement of
Stucken’s,² who has made a study of the same material
over a wide field. He writes: ‘The identity of Portia’s
three suitors is clear from their choice: the Prince of Morocco
chooses the gold casket - he is the sun; the Prince of Arragon
chooses the silver casket - he is the moon; Bassanio chooses the
leaden casket - he is the star youth.’ In support of this
explanation he cites an episode from the Estonian folk-epic
‘Kalewipoeg’, in which the three suitors appear
undisguisedly as the sun, moon and star youths (the last being
‘the Pole-star’s eldest boy’) and once again the
bride falls to the lot of the third.

  
¹
Brandes (1896).

  
²
Stucken (1907, 655).

The Theme Of The Three Caskets

2605

   Thus our little problem has led
us to an astral myth! The only pity is that with this explanation
we are not at the end of the matter. The question is not exhausted,
for we do not share the belief of some investigators that myths
were read in the heavens and brought down to earth; we are more
inclined to judge with Otto Rank¹ that they were projected on
to the heavens after having arisen elsewhere under purely human
conditions. It is in this human content that our interest lies.

   Let us look once more at our
material. In the Estonian epic, just as in the tale from the
Gesta Romanorum
, the subject is a girl choosing between
three suitors; in the scene from
The Merchant of Venice
the
subject is apparently the same, but at the same time something
appears in it that is in the nature of an inversion of the theme: a
man
chooses between three - caskets. If what we were
concerned with were a dream, it would occur to us at once that
caskets are also women, symbols of what is essential in woman, and
therefore of a woman herself - like coffers, boxes, cases, baskets,
and so on. If we boldly assume that there are symbolic
substitutions of the same kind in myths as well, then the casket
scene in
The Merchant of Venice
really becomes the inversion
we suspected. With a wave of the wand, as though we were in a fairy
tale, we have stripped the astral garment from our theme; and now
we see that the theme is a human one,
a man’s choice
between three women
.

   This same content, however, is to
be found in another scene of Shakespeare’s, in one of his
most powerfully moving dramas; not the choice of a bride this time,
yet linked by many hidden similarities to the choice of the casket
in
The Merchant of Venice
. The old King Lear resolves to
divide his kingdom while he is still alive among his three
daughters, in proportion to the amount of love that each of them
expresses for him. The two elder ones, Goneril and Regan, exhaust
themselves in asseverations and laudations of their love for him;
the third, Cordelia, refuses to do so. He should have recognized
the unassuming, speechless love of his third daughter and rewarded
it, but he does not recognize it. He disowns Cordelia, and divides
the kingdom between the other two, to his own and the general ruin.
Is not this once more the scene of a choice between three women, of
whom the youngest is the best, the most excellent one?

  
¹
Rank (1909, 8 ff.).

The Theme Of The Three Caskets

2606

   There will at once occur to us
other scenes from myths, fairy tales and literature, with the same
situation as their content. The shepherd Paris has to choose
between three goddesses, of whom he declares the third to be the
most beautiful. Cinderella, again, is a youngest daughter, who is
preferred by the prince to her two elder sisters. Psyche, in
Apuleius’s story, is the youngest and fairest of three
sisters. Psyche is, on the one hand, revered as Aphrodite in human
form; on the other, she is treated by that goddess as Cinderella
was treated by her stepmother and is set the task of sorting a heap
of mixed seeds, which she accomplishes with the help of small
creatures (doves in the case of Cinderella, ants in the case of
Psyche).¹ Anyone who cared to make a wider survey of the
material would undoubtedly discover other versions of the same
theme preserving the same essential features.

   Let us be content with Cordelia,
Aphrodite, Cinderella and Psyche. In all the stories the three
women, of whom the third is the most excellent one, must surely be
regarded as in some way alike if they are represented as sisters.
(We must not be led astray by the fact that Lear’s choice is
between three
daughters
; this may mean nothing more than
that he has to be represented as an old man. An old man cannot very
well choose between three women in any other way. Thus they become
his daughters.)

   But who are these three sisters
and why must the choice fall on the third? If we could answer this
question, we should be in possession of the interpretation we are
seeking. We have once already made use of an application of
psycho-analytic technique, when we explained the three caskets
symbolically as three women. If we have the courage to proceed in
the same way, we shall be setting foot on a path which will lead us
first to something unexpected and incomprehensible, but which will
perhaps, by a devious route, bring us to a goal.

  
¹
I have to thank Dr. Otto Rank for calling
my attention to these similarities.

The Theme Of The Three Caskets

2607

   It must strike us that this
excellent third woman has in several instances certain peculiar
qualities besides her beauty. They are qualities that seem to be
tending towards some kind of unity; we must certainly not expect to
find them equally well marked in every example. Cordelia makes
herself unrecognizable, in conspicuous like lead, she remains dumb,
she ‘loves and is silent’. Cinderella hides so that she
cannot be found. We may perhaps be allowed to equate concealment
and dumbness. These would of course be only two instances out of
the five we have picked out. But there is an intimation of the same
thing to be found, curiously enough, in two other cases. We have
decided to compare Cordelia, with her obstinate refusal, to lead.
In Bassanio’s short speech while he is choosing the casket,
he says of lead (without in any way leading up to the remark):

‘Thy paleness
¹
moves me more than
eloquence.’

That is to say: ‘Thy plainness moves me
more than the blatant nature of the other two.’ Gold and
silver are ‘loud’; lead is dumb - in fact like
Cordelia, who ‘loves and is silent’.²

   In the ancient Greek accounts of
the Judgement of Paris, nothing is said of any such reticence on
the part of Aphrodite. Each of the three goddesses speaks to the
youth and tries to win him by promises. But, oddly enough, in a
quite modern handling of the same scene this characteristic of the
third one which has struck us makes its appearance again. In the
libretto of Offenbach’s
La Belle Hélène
,
Paris, after telling of the solicitations of the other two
goddesses, describes Aphrodite’s behaviour in this
competition for the beauty-prize:

                                                               
La troisième, ah! la troisième . . .

                                                               
La troisième ne dit rien.

                                                               
Elle eut le prix tout de
même . . .
³

  
¹
‘Plainness’ according to
another reading.

  
²
In Schlegel’s translation this
allusion is quite lost; indeed, it is given the opposite meaning:
‘Dein schlichtes Wesen spricht beredt mich an.’
[‘Thy plainness speaks to me with
eloquence.‘]

  
³
[Literally: ‘The third one, ah! the
third one . . . the third one said nothing. She won
the prize all the same.’]

The Theme Of The Three Caskets

2608

   If we decide to regard the
peculiarities of our ‘third one’ as concentrated in her
‘dumbness’, then psycho-analysis will tell us that in
dreams dumbness is a common representation of death.¹

   More than ten years ago a highly
intelligent man told me a dream which he wanted to use as evidence
of the telepathic nature of dreams. In it he saw an absent friend
from whom he had received no news for a very long time, and
reproached him energetically for his silence. The friend made no
reply. It afterwards turned out that he had met his death by
suicide at about the time of the dream. Let us leave the problem of
telepathy on one side: there seems, however, not to be any doubt
that here the dumbness in the dream represented death. Hiding and
being unfindable - a thing which confronts the prince in the fairly
tale of Cinderella three times, is another unmistakable symbol of
death in dreams; so, too, is a marked pallor, of which the
‘paleness’ of the lead in one reading of
Shakespeare’s text is a reminder.² It would be very much
easier for us to transpose these interpretations from the language
of dreams to the mode of expression used in the myth that is now
under consideration if we could make it seem probable that dumbness
must be interpreted as a sign of being dead in productions other
than dreams.

   At this point I will single out
the ninth story in Grimm’s
Fairy Tales
, which bears
the title ‘The Twelve Brothers’. A king and a queen
have twelve children, all boys. The king declares that if the
thirteenth child is a girl, the boys will have to die. In
expectation of her birth he has twelve coffins made. With their
mother’s help the twelve sons take refuge in a hidden wood,
and swear death to any girl they may meet. A girl is born, grows
up, and learns one day from her mother that she has had twelve
brothers. She decides to seek them out, and in the wood she finds
the youngest; he recognizes her, but is anxious to hide her on
account of the brothers’ oath. The sister says: ‘I will
gladly die, if by so doing I can save my twelve brothers.’
The brothers welcome her affectionately, however, and she stays
with them and looks after their house for them. In a little garden
beside the house grow twelve lilies. The girl picks them and gives
one to each brother. At that moment the brothers are changed into
ravens, and disappear, together with the house and garden. (Ravens
are spirit-birds; the killing of the twelve brothers by their
sister is represented by the picking of the flowers, just as it is
at the beginning of the story by the coffins and the disappearance
of the brothers.) The girl, who is once more ready to save her
brothers from death, is now told that as a condition she must be
dumb for seven years, and not speak a single word. She submits to
the test, which brings her herself into mortal danger. She herself,
that is, dies for her brothers, as she promised to do before she
met them. By remaining dumb she succeeds at last in setting the
ravens free.

  
¹
In Stekel’s
Sprache des
Traumes
, too, dumbness is mentioned among the
‘death’ symbols (1911
a
, 351).

  
²
Stekel (1911
a
), loc. cit.

The Theme Of The Three Caskets

2609

   In the story of ‘The Six
Swans’ the brothers who are changed into birds are set free
in exactly the same way - they are restored to life by their
sister’s dumbness. The girl has made a firm resolve to free
her brothers, ‘even if it should cost her her life’;
and once again (being the wife of the king) she risks her own life
because she refuses to give up her dumbness in order to defend
herself against evil accusations.