Little Red Riding Hood: The Martian Reaction
As I (sometimes) go on about, I am currently studying “Transactional Analysis” which is a form of counselling that is also used for Education purposes. The creator of this Counselling feild Dr Eric Berne wrote a book called “Games People Play” in the 60s which became a best seller and unfortunately got TA the label of “Pop Psychology” (but thats a rant for another time!!!!) Before he died in 1970, Berne was working on a book “What Do You Say After You Say Hello?” but unfortunatley died before its release in 1970. I am current working my way through this book and have found it entertaining, so much so that I had decided to put an entertaining peice about the Little Red Riding Hood fairytail on my site. Berne analyses the story from what he calls “The Martian Veiwpoint”, the naivest possible frame of mind for observing Earthly Happenings .
Now I presume everyone is familuar with the story, so I am not going to tell it again, and please note that I have ommited some of the TA terminology as it would take a while to explain (POP PSYCHOLOGY MY A*RSE!)
*One day LRRH’s mother sent her through the woods to bring food to her grandmother, and on the way she met a wolf. What kind of mother sends a lttle girl into a forest where there are wolves? Why didn’t her mother do it herself, or go along with LRRH? If the grandmother was so helpless, why did mother leave her all by herself in a hut far away? But if LRRH had to go how come her mother had never warned her not to stop and talk to wolves? The story makes it clear that LRRH had never been told this was dangerous. No mother could really be that stupid, so it sounds as if her mother didn’t care much what happened to LRRH, or maybe even wanted to get rid of her. No little girl is that stupid either. How could LRRH look at the wolf’s eyes, ears, hands, and teeth, and still think it was her grandmother? Why didn’t she get out of there as fast as she could? And a mean little thing she was, too, gathering up stones to put in the wolf’s belly. At any rate, any straight thinking girl after talking to the wolf would certainly not have stopped to pick flowers, but would have said to herself: “That son of a bitch is going to eat up my Grandmother if I don’t get some help fast.”
Berne then goes on to make further points
1. The mother is evidentley trying to lose her daughter “accidentally”, or at least she wants to end up saying “Isn’t it awful, you can’t even walk through the park nowadays without some wolf…” etc.
2. The wolf, instead of eating rabbits and such, is obviously overreaching himself, and he must know that he will come to a bad end that way, so he must want to invite trouble. He evidently read Nietzche or someone similar in his youth (if he can talk and tie a bonnet, why should’t he be able to read?), and his motto is something like “Live dangerously and die gloriously.”
3. Grandmother lives alone and and leaves the door unlatched, so she may be hoping for something interesting to happen, something that couldn’t happen if she were living with her family. Maybe that’s why she didn’t move in with them, or at least live next door. She was probably young enough to be ripe for adventure, since LRRH was still a little girl.
4. LRRH tells the wolf quite explicitly where he can meet her again, and even climbs into bed with him. She is obviously playing a game and ends up quite happy about the whole affair.
The truth of the matter is that everybody in the story is looking for some action at almost any price. If the payoff at the end is taken at face value, then the whole thing was a plot to do in the poor wolf by making him think he was outsmarting everyone, using LRRH as bait. In that case the moral of the story is not that innocent maidens should kep out of forests where there are wolves, but wolves should keep away from innocent-looking maidens and their grandmothers; in short a wolf should not walk through the forest alone. This also raises the interesting question of what the mother did after she got rid of LRRH fro the day 
*Extract taken from What Do You Say After You Say Hello by Eric Berne MD
Pretty amusing huh? if I come across any more, I will let y’all know!
Peace
GI 