The Story of the Tree and The Child of the People and the Myth of Medusa: A Comparative Study Based on the Theory of Castration Anxiety

Subject Areas : Mytho

Amir Hossein Zanjanbar ^{1 *}

1 - M.A in Children's and Adolescent Literature, Payame Noor University, Tehran Branch

Received: 2021-10-10 Accepted : 2021-12-08 Published : 2021-12-22

Keywords: Freud, psycho-mythology, Medusa, Stories of Children and Adolescents, The Oedipus Complex, The Tree and The Child of the People,

Abstract :

Freud believes that myths, like dreams, are the symbolic representations of repressed sexual desires and the result of castration anxiety, and on this basis, he offers psychological-mythological reading of the archetype of " Medusa's head". He explains the works of art based on the theory of castration anxiety, and believes that psychological stories, like psycho-biographies, can be analyzed from psychoanalytic point of view. In the present article, the short story of The Tree and The Child of the People, by Abdolmajid Najafi, a psychological story, has been compared with the myth of Medusa, and a psychoanalytic reading of these two texts has been made. The purpose of this comparison is to show that both the myths and the contemporary child and adolescent stories are projections of human inner psyche. The article seeks to answer how castration anxiety is represented in the story of The Tree and The Child of the People and the myth of Medusa. The research, at first by using analytical-descriptive method, decodes the story, and then compares its theme with the psychological characteristics of Medusa from Freudian point of view. The results show that the theme of phallic stage, as one of the stages of psychosexual development, has always been present throughout history, from the myths made by primitive humans to the contemporary stories of children and adolescents.

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