Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Have you heard this one? "There was once upon a time a poor widow who had an only son named Jack, and a cow named Milky-White. And all they had to live on was the milk the cow gave every morning, which they carried to the market and sold. But one morning Milky-White gave no milk, and they didn't know what to do."

That's the introduction to Jack and the Beanstalk, one of the classic folk tales, which most of us read and loved as children. But did you know that it has a Freudian and a Marxist interpretation? Well, it has.

IN THE FREUDIAN READING, Jack lives with his mother because he's got an Oedipus complex. The beanstalk is clearly a phallic symbol. Jack fulfils the Oedipal fantasy by killing a father-figure — the giant — and marrying his mother.

IN THE MARXIST ANALYSIS, Jack is the proletariat forced by the brutal market economy to sell his only asset — the cow — for a pittance. Out of this act of exploitation, the mighty beanstalk of the union movement arises and it allows Jack to ascend and slay the giant of international monopoly capitalism. Liberated, Jack and his mother can now live in a more just system.

Daft? Maybe. But maybe not. Jack and the Beanstalk is dirty, political and universal writes Christopher Brooker in The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. He maintains that we are hard-wired to be receptive to such archetypal tales such as Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk and that they give meaning to our thinking and our lives. Incidentally, Brooker is a Jungian specialist and one of the founders of Private Eye magazine, which might explain a lot. Anyway, regardless of the politics and the psychoanalysis, our favourite bit was when the giant goes, "Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman." We used to love that. The tension. The terror. Only Hitchcock ever came close thereafter. Although, Spielberg's Jaws, to give its due, was near.