Persian tales on the couch: Notes on folktales as the mirror of the contemporary cultural struggles with gender and sexuality

Abstract

This paper presents a report on our psychoanalytic investigation of cultural folktales, myths, and fables, in which we study, primarily, the extent to which such narratives lurk behind contemporary representations of men and women. Our aim is to identify the multiple narrative structures that form the core plots and storylines of these tales. Following Roland Barthes’ work on mythologies, we want to decode the tales’ ideological components by deciphering the axiomatic assumptions these tales make about the nature of perceived social reality. This represents an attempt to study a mind that is derived from the text. More specifically, we study narratives whose storylines revolve around the struggle between men and women in order to identify the culture’s core concerns about and preoccupations with the relationship between the sexes. We believe that cultural myths or folktales are a royal road to a nation’s collective conscience, and include gendered patterns of defenses, obsessions, fears, and paranoia.

Key words:

• culture
• gender
• folklore
• Persian tales
• psychoanalytic criticism

Notes

1 Thus, although Durkheim speaks of collective consciousness, the structure of consciousness remains unconscious in a descriptive sense.

2 One of the shortcomings of psychoanalytic criticism is to treat fictional characters in novels or films as though they were real individuals with id, ego, superego, and unconscious who were suffering from some pathology. Berman (1998) is weary of psychoanalytic critics who take a “pseudo-clinical” stance toward literary work and diagnose a literary figure as if it were a real person undergoing analysis. Recently, Ogden and Ogden (2013) have reiterated the same point by criticizing those contemporary critics who continue in their professional zeal to analyze literary characters as though they agonized from unconscious conflicts or psychological problems that were subject to interpretation or diagnosis.

3 The term “social consciousness” expresses the cognitive and affective structures present in any given culture at a particular time that, through the socialization process, come to inhabit the individual subjects’ worldview, thus defining their desires and relationships to self and the other. Some have used the term “cultural unconscious”; Fredric Jameson (1981) uses the term “political unconscious” to refer to what the social unconscious does rather than means. Frosh (1989 ) sees most of our social institutions and their ideologies as structured by a social unconscious. We are using the term synonymously with “collective consciousness,” which can be traced to Émile Durkheim (1912), who wrote about the individual’s beliefs and action as enslaved by history. Freud (1913) also writes about the concept of the collective mind embedded in the subject’s cultural and historical context:

Without the assumption of a collective mind, which makes it possible to neglect the interruptions of mental acts caused by the extinction of the individual, social psychology in general cannot exist. Unless psychical processes were continued from one generation to another, if each generation were obliged to acquire its attitude to life anew, there would be no progress in this field and next to no development. This gives rise to two further questions: how much can we attribute to psychical continuity in the sequence of generations? And what are the ways and means employed by one generation in order to hand on its mental states to the next one? (p.157).

Jung’s (1970) conception of collective unconscious is fundamentally different from that of Durkheim in that it consists of a pre-experiential set of “mythological motifs, combinations of ideas or images which can be found in the myths of one’s own folk or in those of other races” (p. 152). This universal set of mythological motifs is supposed to be the reservoir of “a collective meaning, a meaning which is the common property of mankind” (p. 322). To Jung and his follower Joseph Campbell (1972, 1988), myths and symbols are a part of universal psychic dispositions – archetypes – that are innate and not subject to acculturation or learning within a sociohistorical context.

4 To Lacan (1977), the unconscious is the discourse of the Other and is structured like language. This reinterpretation of Freud’s concept of the unconscious connects psychoanalysis with structuralism and Marxism. The unconscious becomes a sort of a structuring code that provides syntax for the organization of one’s ideas, wishes, feelings, and memories (Lévi-Strauss, 1949).

5 We can also listen to the manner of the storyteller’s narration. The person can be telling the story as an event in the past, or performing the story to an audience through identification with different characters. In other words, the speaker may inhabit different roles in her narratives of personal experience, and may be telling the story from the perspective of a performed character or performing the story in the here-and-now of the narrative situation. This distinction in oral storytelling comes very close to Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of “double voicing” and the distinction between the represented and the act of representing in a novel.

6

I had gone to Brucke’s laboratory at night, and in response to a gentle knock on the door, I opened it to (the late) Professor Fleischl, who came in with a number of strangers and, after exchanging a few words, sat down at his table. This was followed by a second dream. My friend Fl. [Fliess] had come to Vienna unobtrusively in July. I met him in the street in conversation with my (deceased) friend P., and went with them to some place where they sat opposite each other as though they were at a small table. I sat in front of its narrow end. Fl. spoke about his sister and said that in three quarters of an hour she was dead, and added some such words as “that was the threshold.” As P. failed to understand him, Fl. turned and asked me how much I had told P. about his affairs. Whereupon, overcome by strange emotions, I tried to explain to Fl. that P. (could not understand anything at all, of course, because he) was not alive. But what I actually said—and I myself noticed the mistake—was “NON VIXIT.” I then gave P. a piercing look. Under my gaze he turned pale; his form grew indistinct and his eyes a sickly blue—and finally he melted away. I was highly delighted at this and now realized that Ernst Fleischl, too, had been no more that an apparition, a “revenant” [“ghost”—literally, “one who returns”]; and it seemed to me quite possible that people of that kind only existed as long as one liked and could be got rid of if someone else wished it. (Freud, 1900, p. 421)

7 We are aware of the controversy over mining the meanings of folktales. Muller has argued that the connection between folktales and their original metaphors has been lost, and new metaphors have evolved on the base of forgotten metaphors. What we do in mining meaning out of folktales is in one sense a way of establishing new metaphors (Dundes, 1969).

8 One example of this type of superphallic male’s being associated with the removal of vaginal snakes comes from Mexican-American folklore. The legends of the chirroneras – vaginal snakes that impregnate women – mentioned previously include this description: “They finally got this Negro to come and do it to her, and that snake bit him you know, on the end of his thing, and that is how they got it out” (De Caro, 1985, p. 30; emphasis in the original). The Negro, or black man, in this account of the superphallic removing the dentata, does not die or get ill from his encounter with the snake; on the contrary, he is paid $100 for the act. Yet he is characterized as “dirty” by the informant, suggesting an animalistic equation between the chirroneras and the Negro. (Even referring to the man by his color suggests a sense of separation and “otherness” about him.)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Siamak Movahedi

Authors

Siamak Movahedi, PhD, is professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, professor of psychoanalysis, training and supervising analyst, and director of the institute and the doctoral program in the study of psychoanalysis, society and culture at Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, and training and supervising analyst at the Ham Ava Institute of Psychotherapy, Tehran, Iran. He is a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA), American Psychological Association (APA), and International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). In addition, he is the North America editor of Psychoanalytic Discourse, and author of numerous papers and chapters in books and major national and international journals in psychoanalysis, psychology, and sociology.

Nahaleh Moshtagh

Nahaleh Moshtagh, PhD, is clinical psychologist in private practice in Tehran specializing in psychoanalytic psychotherapy with adolescents, adults, and couples, supervisor of psychology interns and trainees in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and co-director of Ham Ava Institute of Psychotherapy, Tehran, Iran. She is a candidate at the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis. She is also coeditor-in-chief of Psychoanalytic Discourse, and the author and translator of major psychoanalytic works. Her recent papers have been published in Psychoanalytic Discourse, Psychoanalytic Review, and Modern Psychoanalysis. She is the Farsi translator of Sandler, Dare and Holder’s The patient and the analyst, and Adam Phillips’s Winnicott.