‘Story’ as a Substitute of the Dyadic Unit and Rabindranath Tagore’s Tell Me a Story

Abstract

Story has allured a child since time immemorial. It has provided him with unadulterated pleasure by making him soar in the sphere of mysteries and fantasies. Pleasure, according to Freud, is the controlling force of the unconscious, the abode of one’s true self. As the infant develops into a child, he enters into the conscious world. But this development initiates, too, a separation from mother with whom he was related in an asocial pleasurable unity until the present. Consequently, the child seeks at this stage of life other means to compensate the loss of his primary necessity, pleasure. One of those ways is listening to stories, something that enables him to escape from the world of reality (consciousness) to the delightful world of day-dreams. As pleasure is the primary need of the unconscious, and as day-dreams provide a child with pleasurable experience, there lies a close relationship between stories and the unconscious demands. Tagore realized this truth, and conveyed the same it in the story ‘Tell Me a Story.’