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History and mythology of wolf |
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| While psycanalists agree on the interest and importance of fairy tales in their studies as well as in human souls, they diverge from one another on the interpretation of these tales. About the wolf, Freud and Junge heirs seem to join again and assign to the Wolf of fairy tales impulses which are said ?animal?, that is to say devouring and sexual, and also primary instincts such as anger, cruelty, jealousy... Freudian analysis will assimilate the symbol of the Wolf to ?that?. Jung, on his turn, will see in the Wolf an archetypal: « shadow and evil ». In both cases, we face a repressed part of man, that part which, tied to the body, precisely, opposes reason, or rather the cult of rationality, as it is praticed in our western societies. |
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Man is a wolf to other men, sentence generally attributed to Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, 1660. (In the state of nature, characterized by the abscense of sovereign State, each man represents a big danger for others, as all have the same ability to inflict death). In fact its author is Plautus, who has been resumed by Montaigne, later by Hobbes.
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The wolf has permeated literature to a great extent and in particular tales and legends. And it?s in addition for this reason that the fear of wolf could cross the years. Who are the parents who have never threatened their children to see the vist of the big mean wolf, if they would not finish their soup? You can not stop thinking off the famous tale by Charles Perrault, ?Little Red Riding Hood?. In addition the evolution of this tale is actually reveiling the evolution of the predator?s representaion. In fact, if Perrault tells us the death of the little girl, Grimm brothers, after two centuries, let little red cap ?reborn? by bringing into play a hutsman who killing the wolf liberates the two women from a certain death ... Innocence on one side, meanness on the ogher? Submission and domination? Sexual slavery, SM ... | |
Who is afraid of the very mean wolf? Disappeard in France in 1939, you have to wait until 1992 to see it colonise the Alps from Italy and Pyrenees before and Spain later. Why does it provoke Shepherds? anger? A deserved poor reputation? |
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The three monoteisms have a dominant idea of the man?s anthropocentric role. The myth of the human being, king of creation is at the hart of Christendom. Christian theology ignores haughtily animan suffering, without getting back on the execrable Descartes, and his unemotional animal machine. Already according to the (I, 26 / I, 28 / IX, 2 et 3), animal is just a game-slave forced to allay or replace human work. The main difference, that tears us apart from the wolf, is our incapacity, greater everyday, to live with nature. Man would be wrong if he consider him since long time as the ?social animal?. Ethologists claim it: the wolf is an eminently social animal. A clan?s life reveals some complex and strong links among the individuals. A genuine solidarity. |
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