One of the Arabian Nights tales, “The Fisherman and the Jinny,” gives an almost complete rendering of the fairy-tale motif which features a giant in conflict with an ordinary person.6 This theme is common to all cultures in some form, since children everywhere fear and chafe under the power adults hold over them. (In the West, the theme is best known in the form exemplified by the Brothers Grimm’s story “The Spirit in the Bottle.”) Children know that, short of doing adults’ bidding, they have only one way to be safe from adult wrath: through outwitting them.
“The Fisherman and the Jinny” tells how a poor fisherman casts his net into the sea four times. First he catches a dead jackass, the second time a pitcher full of sand and mud. The third effort gains him less than the preceding ones: potsherds and broken glass. The fourth time around, the fisherman brings up a copper jar. As he opens it, a huge cloud emerges, which materializes into a giant Jinny (genie) that threatens to kill him, despite all the fisherman’s entreaties. The fisherman saves himself with his wits: he taunts the Jinny by doubting aloud that the huge Jinny could ever have fitted into such a small vessel; thus he induces the Jinny to return into the jar to prove it. Then the fisherman quickly caps and seals the jar and throws it back into the ocean.
In other cultures the same motif may appear in a version where the evil figure materializes as a big, ferocious animal which threatens to devour the hero, who, except for his cunning, is in no way a match for this adversary. The hero then reflects aloud that it must be easy for such a powerful spirit to take the form of a huge creature, but that it could not possibly turn itself into a little animal, such as a mouse or a bird. This appeal to the vanity of the spirit spells its doom. To show that nothing is impossible to it, the evil spirit transforms itself into the tiny animal, which is then easily vanquished by the hero.7
The story of “The Fisherman and the Jinny” is richer in hidden messages than other versions of this fairy-tale motif, as it contains significant details not always found in other renderings. One feature is an account of how the Jinny came to be so ruthless as to wish to kill the person who sets him free; another feature is that three unsuccessful attempts are finally rewarded on the fourth try.
According to adult morality, the longer an imprisonment lasts, the more grateful the prisoner should be to the person who liberates him. But this is not how the Jinny describes it: As he sat confined in the bottle during the first hundred years, he “said in my heart, ‘Whoso shall release me, him will I enrich for ever and ever.’ But the full century went by, and when no one set me free, I entered upon the second five score saying: ‘Whoso shall release me, for him I will open the hoards of the earth.’ Still no one set me free, and thus four hundred years passed away. Then quoth I, ‘Whoso shall release me, for him will I fulfill three wishes.’ Yet no one set me free. Thereupon I waxed wroth with exceeding wrath and said to myself, ‘Whoso shall release me from this time forth, him will I slay….’ ”
This is exactly how a young child feels when he has been “deserted.” First he thinks to himself how happy he will be when his mother comes back; or when sent to his room, how glad he will be when permitted to leave it again, and how he will reward Mother. But as time passes, the child becomes angrier and angrier, and he fantasizes the terrible revenge he will take on those who have deprived him. The fact that, in reality, he may be very happy when reprieved does not change how his thoughts move from rewarding to punishing those who have inflicted discomfort on him. Thus, the way the Jinny’s thoughts evolve gives the story psychological truth for a child.
An example of this progression of feelings was shown by a three-year-old boy whose parents had gone abroad for several weeks. The boy had been speaking quite well before his parents’ departure, and continued to do so with the woman taking care of him and with others. But on his parents’ return, he wouldn’t say a word to them or anybody else for two weeks. From what he had told his caretaker, it was clear that during the first few days of his parents’ absence he had looked forward with great anticipation to their return. By the end of the first week, however, he began to talk about how angry he was that they had left him, and how he would get even with them on their return. A week later, he refused even to speak about his parents, and became violently angry at anyone who mentioned them. When his mother and father did finally arrive, he silently turned away from them. Despite all efforts to reach him, the boy remained frozen in his rejection. It took several weeks of compassionate understanding of his predicament on the part of his parents before the boy could become his old self again. It seems clear that as time passed, the child’s anger had increased until it became so violent and overwhelming as to make him fear that if he let himself go, he would destroy his parents or be destroyed in retaliation. His refusal to talk was his defense: his way of protecting both himself and his parents against the consequences of his towering rage.
There is no way to know whether in the original language of “The Fisherman and the Jinny” there is a saying similar to ours about “bottled-up” feelings. But the image of confinement in a bottle was as apt then as it is for us now. In some form, every child has experiences similar to those of the three-year-old boy, though usually in less extreme form and without overt reactions like his. On his own, the child does not know what has happened to him—all he knows is that he has to act this way. Efforts to help such a child understand rationally will not affect the child, and will leave him defeated to boot, since he does not yet think rationally.
If you tell a small child that a little boy became so angry at his parents that he didn’t talk to them for two weeks, his reaction will be: “That’s stupid!” If you try to explain why the boy didn’t speak for two weeks, your listening child feels even more that to act this way is stupid—now, not only because he considers the action foolish, but also because the explanation does not make sense to him.
A child cannot consciously accept that his anger may make him speechless, or that he may wish to destroy those on whom he depends for his existence. To understand this would mean he must accept the fact that his own emotions may so overpower him that he does not have control over them—a very scary thought. The idea that forces may reside within us which are beyond our control is too threatening to be entertained, and not just by a child.*
Action takes the place of understanding for a child, and this becomes increasingly true the more strongly he feels. A child may have learned to say otherwise under adult guidance, but as he really sees it, people do not cry because they are sad; they just cry. People do not hit out and destroy, or stop talking because they are angry; they just do these things. A child may have learned he can placate adults by explaining his action thus: “I did it because I am angry”—but that does not change the fact that the child does not experience anger as anger, but only as an impulse to hit, to destroy, to keep silent. Not before puberty do we begin to recognize our emotions for what they are without immediately acting on them, or wishing to do so.
The child’s unconscious processes can become clarified for him only through images which speak directly to his unconscious. The images evoked by fairy tales do this. As the child does not think, “When Mother comes back, I’ll be happy” but “I’ll give her something,” so the Jinny said to himself, “Whoever will release me, I’ll enrich.” As the child does not think, “I’m so angry I could kill this person” but “When I see him, I’ll kill him,” so the Jinny says “I’ll slay whoever releases me.” If a real person is said to think or act this way, that idea arouses too much anxiety to permit understanding. But the child knows that the Jinny is an imaginary figure, so he can afford to recognize what motivates the Jinny, without being forced to make a direct application to himself.
As the child spins fantasies around the story—and unless he does, the fairy tale loses most of its impact—he slowly becomes familiar with how the Jinny responds to frustration and incarceration, an important step toward becoming acquainted with parallel reactions in himself. Since it is a fairy tale out of never-never-land which presents the child with these images of behaving, he can swing back and forth in his own mind between “It’s true, that’s how one acts and reacts” and “It’s all untrue, it’s just a story,” depending on how ready he is to recognize these processes in himself.
Most important of all, since the fairy tale guarantees a happy outcome, the child need not fear permitting his unconscious to come to the fore in line with the story’s content, because he knows that, whatever he may find out, he’ll “live happily ever after.”
The fantastic exaggerations of the story, such as being “bottled up” for centuries, make reactions plausible and acceptable where situations presented more realistically, such as a parent’s absence, would not. To the child, the parent’s absence seems an eternity—a feeling that remains unaffected by Mother’s truthful explanation that she was gone for only half an hour. So the fairy tale’s fantastic exaggerations give it the ring of psychological truth—while realistic explanations seem psychologically untrue, however true to fact.
“The Fisherman and the Jinny” illustrates why the simplified and bowdlerized fairy tale loses all value. Looking at the story from the outside, it would seem unnecessary to have the Jinny’s thought undergo such changes from wishing to reward the person who will set him free to deciding to punish him. The story could be told as just an evil Jinny wishing to kill his liberator, who, although only a weak human, nevertheless manages to outsmart the powerful spirit. But in this simplified form it becomes just a scary tale with a happy ending, without psychological truth to it. It is the Jinny’s change from wishing-to-reward to wishing-to-punish which permits the child to empathize with the story. Since the story so truthfully describes what went on in the Jinny’s mind, the idea that the fisherman may be able to outwit the Jinny also attains veracity. It is the elimination of such seemingly insignificant elements which makes fairy tales lose their deeper meaning, and thus makes them uninteresting to the child.
Without being conscious of it, the child rejoices in the fairy tale’s warning to those who hold the power to “bottle him up.” There are plenty of modern children’s stories in which a child outwits an adult. But because they are too direct, these stories do not offer relief in imagination from always having to live under the sway of adult power; or else they scare the child, whose security rests on the adult being more accomplished than he, and able to protect him reliably.
This is the value of outsmarting a Jinny or a giant, as opposed to doing the same to an adult. If the child is told he can get the better of somebody like his parents, this does offer a pleasurable thought, but at the same time it creates anxiety, because if that is possible, then the child might not be adequately protected by such gullible people. But since a giant is an imaginary figure, the child can fantasize outsmarting him to the degree of being able not only to overpower but to destroy him, and still retain real grownup people as protectors.
The fairy story “The Fisherman and the Jinny” has several advantages over those of the Jack (“Jack the Giant Killer,” “Jack and the Beanstalk”) cycle. Since the fisherman is not only an adult but, as we are told, the father of children, the child is told implicitly by the story that his parent may feel threatened by powers stronger than he, but is so clever that he overcomes them. According to this tale, the child can truly have the best of both worlds. He can cast himself in the role of the fisherman and imagine himself getting the better of the giant. Or he can cast his parent in the role of the fisherman, and imagine himself as a spirit that can threaten his parent, while being assured that the same parent will win out.
A seemingly insignificant but important feature of “The Fisherman and the Jinny” is that the fisherman has to experience three defeats before he catches the vessel with the Jinny in it. Although it would be simpler to begin the story with the netting of the fateful bottle, this element tells the child without any moralizing that one cannot expect success with the first, or even the second or the third try. Things are not quite so easy to accomplish as one may imagine or wish. To a less persistent person, the fisherman’s first three catches would suggest giving up because each effort leads only to worse things. That one must not give up, despite initial failure, is such an important message for children that many fables and fairy tales contain it. The message is effective as long as it is delivered not as a moral or demand, but in a casual way which indicates that this is how life is. Further, the magic event of overpowering the giant Jinny does not take place without effort or cunning; these are good reasons to sharpen one’s mind and continue one’s efforts, whatever the task may be.
Another detail in this story that may likewise seem insignificant, but whose elimination would similarly weaken the story’s impact, is the parallel made between the four efforts of the fisherman which are finally crowned by success, and the four steps in the increasing anger of the Jinny. This juxtaposes the maturity of the parent-fisherman and the immaturity of the Jinny, and addresses the crucial problem which life early presents to all of us: whether to be governed by our emotions or by our rationality.
To put the conflict into psychoanalytic terms, it symbolizes the difficult battle we all have to struggle with: should we give in to the pleasure principle, which drives us to gain immediate satisfaction of our wants or to seek violent revenge for our frustrations, even on those who have nothing to do with them—or should we relinquish living by such impulses and settle for a life dominated by the reality principle, according to which we must be willing to accept many frustrations in order to gain lasting rewards? The fisherman, by not permitting his disappointing catches to deter him from continuing his efforts, chose the reality principle, which finally gained him success.
The decision about the pleasure principle is so important that many fairy tales and myths try to teach it. To illustrate the direct, didactic way a myth deals with this crucial choice compared to the gentle, indirect, undemanding, and therefore psychologically more effective way in which fairy tales convey this message, let us consider the myth of Hercules.8
In the myth, we are told that for Hercules “the time had come when it was to be seen whether he would use his gifts for good or for evil. Hercules left the shepherds and went to a solitary region to consider what his course in life should be. As he sat pondering, he saw two women tall in stature coming toward him. One was beautiful and noble, of modest mien. The other was full-bosomed and seductive and carried herself arrogantly.” The first woman, the tale continues, is Virtue; the second is Pleasure. Each woman offers promises for Hercules’ future if he chooses the path she suggests as his life’s course.
Hercules at the crossroads is a paradigmatic image because we all, like him, are enticed by the vision of eternal easy enjoyment where we “will reap the fruits of another’s labor and refuse nothing that could bring profit,” as promised by “Idle Pleasure, camouflaged as Permanent Happiness.” But we also are beckoned by Virtue and its “long and hard way to satisfaction,” which tells “that nothing is granted to man without effort and toil” and that “if you would be held in esteem by a city, you must render it services; if you would harvest, you must sow.”
The difference between myth and fairy tale is highlighted by the myth telling us directly that the two women speaking to Hercules are “Idle Pleasure” and “Virtue.” Similar to figures in a fairy tale, these two women are embodiments of the conflicting inner tendencies and the thoughts of the hero. In this myth the two are described as alternatives, although it is clearly implied that in fact they are not—between Idle Pleasure and Virtue, we must choose the latter. The fairy tale never confronts us so directly, or tells us outright how we must choose. Instead, the fairy tale helps children to develop the desire for a higher consciousness through what is implied in the story. The fairy tale convinces through the appeal it makes to our imagination and the attractive outcome of events, which entices us.
*How upsetting it is for a child to think that, unbeknownst to him, powerful processes are going on within him may be illustrated by what happened to one seven-year-old when his parents tried to explain to him that his emotions had carried him away to do things of which they—and he—severely disapproved. The child’s reaction was: “You mean there is a machine in me that ticks away all the time and at any moment may explode me?” From then on, this boy lived for a time in real terror of impending self-destruction.