ABSTRACT
Rumpelstiltskin’s story survived and grew in appeal not because spinners invented a satisfying tale of men’s buffoonery, another among countless examples from Comedia del Arte to TV sitcoms, but because subsequent generations sensed its deeper organization. Rumpelstiltskin rescued stable and loving family life by insisting on a “talking cure”. One of the great submerged themes of Rumpelstiltskin, calling the unmentionable by its proper label, asserts the importance of naming. Speaking explicitly and thereby bringing to consciousness, reigns a therapeutic standard in many forms of treatment, beginning with psychoanalysis but also taught in at least one fairytale. The Tale of Rumpelstiltskin hinges on a women shamelessly uttering, perhaps in public, what had been overheard in private, a word plausibly reconstructed to refer to something never openly discussed. The spinnstube’s astute women prescribed lightly, knowing every life and every marriage represents a bargain, a personal gamble. The spinnstube’s women knew that men suspected of impotence were publicly humiliated.
