REPRESSION - A REEXAMINATION OF THE CONCEPT AS APPLIED TO FOLKTALES

Psychoanalytic anthropologists assume that folktales often reflect unc onscious beliefs and attitudes of listeners, who can tolerate anxiety- provoking images and messages (perhaps wish fulfillments) because thes e have been projected at a safe distance into the characters in the st ory. Here I argue that our theory for how such a process occurs is ina dequate in terms of contemporary psychoanalytic theory. We need to ree xamine a number of questions for which we may have assumed we already have answers, including the nature of repression and how it is accompl ished; who or what ''hears'' an unconscious idea that has been collect ively repressed when it is expressed in a folktale; and whether Freud' s structural model of id-ego-super-ego can provide an adequate theoret ical framework for understanding how unconscious ideas find their way into ''expressive culture.'' I examine these questions in light of a f olktale 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 c harge of repression.