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KMID : 0385319980090010036
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Journal of Korean Psychoanalytic Society
1998 Volume.9 No. 1 p.36 ~ p.51
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A Study on ’The Brother and the Sister Who Became the Sun and the Moon’, the Most Popular Korean Folk Fairy Tale
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Ha Jee-Hyun
Cho Doo-Young
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Abstract
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The fairy tales deal the universal problems in early human development and give the solutions to help the children deal with the painful intrapsychic and real conflicts which are still hard to master in their minds. Each fairy tale reflects the hierarchical developmental tasks and fosters socialization and ego development through the gratification of the impulses in fantasy, thus preventing unacceptable behaviors from being acted out in real situations. As the fairy tales reflect intrapsychic conflicts, emotional state, and the developmental stages of the children, it would be useful to interpret them analytically to understand their minds. The interpretation should be done in the same way as dreams are interpreted. The story of ’the Brother and the Sister Who Became the Sun and the Moon’, the most classical Korean fairy tale, could be summarized as follows - A long time ago, a mother came across a tiger on the way back from her work in a nearby village. At first, the tiger wanted some left-over cakes she brought for her children, and she gave them. However the tiger wanted more and more, and she had to obliged to those requests. In this way, the tiger took all of the cakes and her clothes, started to eat her limbs one by one and eventually ate up her whole body. Disguised as the mother by her clothes, the tiger went to her cabin to attack her children. However, the old brother recognized the tiger, and escaped from the cabin with his sister. Chased by the tiger, they hid themselves up in a nearby tree. The tiger found them but did not know how to climb up. Unfortunately, however, the younger sister made a slip of the tongue of telling the tiger to use an ax to climb up. The children were chased up to the top by the tiger and had no way to run. Finally, they preyed to God to save their lives, and God responded to them by lowering a rope to get them to the heaven. The tiger also asked God for a rope. God, this time, lowered a rotten rope and the tiger fell to the ground. God ordered the brother to become the sun and the sister the moon. The two main characters,’the brother and the sister’, reflect their less confirmed gender identities and dependency in their dyadic relationship with the mother. The antagonist tiger represents the bad parental image, the tither image in oedipal period, and their own badness in children’s psyche. Oedipal theme forced the difference between the boy and the girl open when they confronted the tiger, as the younger sister somehow seducesd the tiger to continue to chase her up. And the animal character as the antagonist makes children and parents easily accept the story, as children have animistic tendency in preoperation period and as parent can perceive without much resistance their projected antagonistic images by the neutral value of an animal. ’God’ who saved the brother and the sister is the omnipotent parental image, and being rescued represents their dependency and immaturity.
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