Nobody imagines that even the most primitive man always tells his fantastic stories merely to himself; and seeing that he often relates them to other people it should be as widely agreed that he must be influenced by the presence of his listeners. In this way it would appear to be obvious that the folk story is, in a sense, a social product.
But to us the primitive tale frequently seems to be such stuff as dreams are made of. It is full of strange and fanciful images, and many of the laws that hold sway over our everyday experience seem, in the popular story, to be set on one side. Distance may be obliterated, and time presents no obstacle; the social relationships of everyday life may be completely overturned; and the wishes hardly even formulated in the working-day world come to a triumphant and easy realisation. This is all very like the dream.
Now the dream is, to use Freud's expression, a "momentous psychic event." And his work has, beyond doubt, shown how, by a careful psychological analysis, what at first tends to appear a mere muddled mass may be shown to illustrate the most perfectly determined order. This cannot help but suggest to us that psychology may perform the same office for the folk story, and may demonstrate, in this case also, how, even in its most
