Repression: A Reexamination of the Concept as Applied to Folktales

Psychoanalytic anthropologists assume that folktales often reflect unconscious beliefs and attitudes of listeners, who can tolerate anxiety‐provoking images and messages (perhaps wish fulfillments) because these have been projected at a safe distance into the characters in the story. Here I argue that our theory for how such a process occurs is inadequate in terms of contemporary psychoanalytic theory. We need to reexamine a number of questions for which we may have assumed we already have answers, including the nature of repression and how it is accomplished; who or what "hears" an unconscious idea that has been collectively repressed when it is expressed in a folktale; and whether Freud's structural model of id‐ego‐superego can provide an adequate theoretical framework for understanding how unconscious ideas find their way into "expressive culture." I examine these questions in light of a folktale collected among Brazilian peasants. I conclude by questioning the central importance of the ego in repression, and propose a concept of a whole, or supraordinate, self to describe the actual agency in charge of repression.