Recreating the myth of Little Red Riding Hood in Ghada Elseman's "Lily and the Wolf" based on the theories of Freud and Jung

The story of “Little Red Riding Hood”, known in Arabic as “Laila wal Dhi’b”( Laila and the Wolf), is one of the mythological narratives that has been retold throughout history in various forms and representations. The Syrian writer “Ghada al-Samman”, in her reinterpretation of this story, adopts a different approach, deconstructing the classical narrative and offering a new reading of it. The present study aims to analyze this work through a descriptive–analytical and comparative method, within the framework of psychoanalytic criticism, based on the theoretical models of “Sigmund Freud” (the structure of the mind and the unconscious) and “Carl Gustav Jung” (collective archetypes). These two models have been selected because al-Samman’s story appears to possess an archetypal structure, and its surreal and symbolic events—especially the encounter between Laila and the Wolf—can only be interpreted and decoded through psychoanalytic analysis drawn from these two theories. Findings show that al-Samman, by redefining the role of charactersand transforming their relationships, has employed the psychoanalytic implications of the original tale to express her own intellectual and educational concerns—most notably, the issue of individuals’ inability to form healthy relationships with others, a problem rooted in psychological wounds of childhood