"the Monkey's Paw" and Freud's Three Caskets Theme (Sigmund Freud's Essay "the Theme of the Three Caskets") (Critical Essay‪)‬

Hope springs eternal in the human breast. Other attributes of humanity, some not so bouncy as that impulse of optimism, abide also in that ribbed chamber, Pandora's box. We will open the casket only a crack, just now. W.W. Jacobs' famous story is a sophisticated tale in a lengthy tradition of wish fulfillment stories, such as genie-in-a-bottle fables, and other reality principle vs. pleasure principle dramatizations. In his 1913 essay, "The Theme of the Three Caskets," the sort of essay readers today find Jungian because of its emphasis on myth rather than an individual case analysis, Freud shows how the choice among three caskets (boxes) in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is a mythic remnant that appears in creative works and in the mind of man more generally in continual retransformations. Here is Freud's summary of the choices presented in that play, which we will compare afterward to three wishes.