The Big Bad Wolf

Helena Iara is afraid of the Big Bad Wolf.  Well, sort of.  From time to time, especially when we are playing hide and seek, she will run toward me with a gleeful scream of pretend fear and say "Lobo Mau, Lobo Mau!" and then jump into my arms.  Then she giggles again, cuddles, and runs off to find any sign of the Big Bad Wolf that might give her a chance to do it again.

There are no wolves in Helena's life.  If she really wanted something to fear, she would do much better thinking about the pit vipers we find in the garden from time to time.  How did the wolf come to occupy such a significant place in her imagination and play?

A couple of years ago, Rita and I made a series of short films with pre-schoolers from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro.  A surprising number of them featured the Big Bad Wolf, from the amazingly funny "Incredible story of Granny and the Big Bad Wolf", to "The Magic Wand" and even a music video called "Bats".  These kids lived in a place that was authentically frightening, where we heard gunfights in the streets regularly, and occasionally would see either cops or drug soldiers running through the streets, pursued by their enemies.  Yet only one of the kids' stories made reference to guns, and many of them talked about wolves.

I don't recall whether it was Kierkegaard or Heidegger who insisted that if fear means that you are frightened of something, anxiety is when you are scared of nothing.  The clenched heart and cloying sweat of fear are there, but you don't have anything to look at, to say: "This is the cause of my fear."  And though we often think of anxiety as the domain of stressed-out urbanites and patients in psychoanalysis, early childhood must be a very anxious time.  Think of Helena: from time to time, without any real explanation that she can understand, we pick up her clothes and her toys, get in an airplane, and start living somewhere else: in a favela of Recife, the mountains of Santa Fe, the middle of the Amazon jungle.  And right about when she gets comfortable and starts to like the place, we go back.

There is probably an origin of anxiety in evolutionary biology, too: the need to keep on your toes, or simply that when we evolved the biology of fear, it didn't make as much genetic sense to also evolve the capacity to relax.  So anxiety is with us, even when we are little kids.

The Big Bad Wolf, I think (or any imaginary object that scares us) serves as a way to transform anxiety into fear, a way to find a cause for the broad-ranging uncertainty we feel.  As Helena talks about the Wolf, she consoles herself to say, "Here is the danger.  Other places are safe."  Instead of worrying (another manifestation of anxiety!) that she fears something imaginary, I should be happy that she has found a way to remove anxiety from her life, displacing it onto a game like the Wolf.