Customer Reviews

The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales

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Bruno Bettelheim makes a very good case for the importance of reading fairy tales to children. He proposes that by hearing about life-threatening problems, serious problems, children are given vital information for the planning of their lives and the formation of their personalities.

By hearing of success against great odds, children are given hope that they, too, as powerless as they may feel themselves (as children), can one day hope to "live happily ever after."

This is in sharp contrast to programming such as "Barney" which presents an unreal fairy-tale present. While children may enjoy seeing programs where there is no violence, they nevertheless DO need to have the reassurance that the difficulties they experience in daily living are universal, and that by perseverance they can develop into good strong, kind people.

The author defines a fairy story as one in which there is a happy ending. Exceptions are (notably) "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" and "The Little Match Girl".

I took a renewed interest in reading these tales to my youngsters, and found that indeed they did appear to be most receptive to them. And no longer did rather gory details disturb me, as the children DO seem to realize that 1) it is just a story, and 2) there is in fact some reasonableness to the idea of unhappy people in this suffering world.

I recommend this book very highly, indeed, to parents of young children. But Dr. Bettelheim cautions against telling the children how good the stories are for them, lest the full impact be somewhat dissipated.

It is well known that storytelling is an innate expression of civilization, in an effort to define who we are and to make sense of the world. The fairy tale is an important part of this tradition that has a long and rich history spanning thousands of years.

First published in 1975, Bruno Bettleheim, one of Sigmund Freud's followers and an important contributor to psychoanalysis, has written an incredible book, suggesting that the fairy tale has a pedagogical use, educating the child about the struggles in life, that these struggles are an intrinsic aspect of existence. Following Plato, he believes that the literary education of children should begin with the telling of myths. In other words, the fairy tale can present models for behaviour, providing meaning and value to our lives. This wonderful book expresses this view extremely well and also provides a frame of reference towards the child's overall psychological development.

I have read Freud for some years, and nowhere, including Freud himself, have I read a more succinctly expressed view on the ultimate purpose of psychoanalysis, than in this book by Dr. Bettleheim, he writes,

"Psychoanalysis was created to enable man to accept the problematic nature of life without being defeated by it, or giving in to escapism. Freud's prescription is that only by struggling courageously against what seems like unwieldy odds can man succeed in wringing meaning out of existence." (P.8)

Fairy tales inform us about life's struggles, hardships and the reality of death. From Bettleheim's point of view, the fairy tale is a "manifold form" that communicates to the child, educates them, against life's vagaries and realities, which are the unavoidable aspects of our existence. More specifically, the fairy tale is an educational tool to help children grow and develop into adults. He goes on to say that the child needs to be given "...suggestions in symbolic form about how he may deal with these issues and grow safely into maturity." (P.9)

Bettleheim adeptly sets out to prove his theses by analysing well known fairy tales in the context of psychoanalytic theory, persuasively arguing the value of these tales towards the child's psychological development.

If you are interested in psychoanalysis and would like to know more about the profound positive effects the telling of fairy tales can have on our young, this incredible book is indispensable.

Bruno Bettelheim's book is excellent in looking at the psychology behind fairy tales. I think what most modern readers forget is that the Fairy Tales were moral tales, and that we cannot really look at them with modern eyes. In the earlier eras, Children were viewed as "miniature adults" that had to be shown the ropes of what was considered the modes of good and acceptable behavior in society. I read this book after the release of the film "The Company of Wolves" which took Little Red Riding Hood and put it into a tale of adolecence and budding sensuality against what is considered staying on the straight and narrow path. The effect was pure Bettelhiem. I would definitely recommend this book to give a new perspective on fairy tales and their importance in the collective consciousness of our world.

Got kids? Want them to grow up to be as emotionally, intellectually and spititually developed as possible? Then tell them fairy tales! The world famous child phychologist Bruno Bettelheim belives that the telling of fairy tales in thier original form can be the single most powerful influence in the lives of children. After reading his book on the subject: "The Uses Of Enchantment" you would (as I have) come to percieve the value of this medium for the channeling of essential information about how to live sucessfully in society. When Einstein was asked by a concerned mother what she could do to best promote her children's intellectual development he responded: "Tell them fairy tales!" When she pressed him for what else she could do he said: "Tell them more fairy tales!" Fairy tales reach the young child on the 'enchanted' level which is his world and give acceptance and approval to the chaotic and uncontrolable emotional states which rule him. They involve him in the delemas of the 'hero' and entice him to believe that the problems that presently so overwhelm him will ultimately be resolved if he will stick steadfastly to the true path. This body of liturature was has it's roots in prehistory and has been shaped with the particular aim of the socialization of the young: for which reason it must be passed on in it's original form. Any application of this insight will ultimatley result in happier, more productive and more thoroughly adjusted and socialized sons and daughters. More importantly though, right from the moment it begins it confers a compelling and involving validation of the child that exists at it's center. A fairy tale told in it's original form is: "a love gift to a child"!

While reading this book I found many ah-ha moments. I found it inspirational in getting my creative writing juices flowing and in showing even more reasons for why not censoring fairy tales is good for children. That being said, I also found myself questioning many of the authors arguments. I know very little about freudian psychology and while I can easily accept the idea of the id, ego, and super ego standing as metaphors for instict, self, and conscience, I did have a hard time with all of the oedipal references. Still, I accepted them in terms of the tension between a child and his same sex parent as he comes of age rather than the desire to have the opposite sex parent all to himself. I also felt uneasy about the fact that the children he was referencing seemed far more disturbed than the normal child and I highly doubt that not exposing your child to fairy tales will cause such damage to a child. Still, I was aware that he was a child psychologist and accepted that the children he had most contact with were the more disturbed children so that is why he chose them for his frames of reference. The first real problem I had with the text, however, was when he made reference to autism and a child who was "cured of autism".

Later in the text he mentions a study where there was a group of children who were familiar with violent fairy tales, and a group of children who were only familiar with the watered down versions. Both groups were showed violent films. Bettelheim claimed that the group exposed to the fairy tales reacted less aggressively to the films. I found this interesting but poorly cited which makes me wonder about the ligitamacy of this assumption. Reading other reviews and finding out more about Bettelheim's history helped me put the reading into perspective.

I will probably only recomend this book to people with an interest in literary analysis or fantasy writing to serve as an inpiration, but I would add a disclaimer about his questionable credibility.

Bettelheim by most accounts was a monster; perhaps that's what enabled him to unearth the monstrousness in our fairy tales. This often brilliant book, hampered by repetitive and awakward prose, shows how the stories we grow up with help us to symbolize and work through our inner conflicts. I know of no other book like this and I found it evoked childhood feelings of mine -- as well as present problems derived from them -- with great acuity.

What the book is lacking in is wit, a sense of proportion, a historical sensibility, and overall design. Shockingly the book completely unravels when Bettelheim analyzes the most popular fairy tale of all time, Cinderella. As this tale doesn't fit in as well as others with psychoanalytic theory, one feels him jamming his theories inappropriately into it, not unlike the stepsisters forcing their feet into the glass slipper by hacking off their toes and heels. Bettelheim doesn't self-destruct that badly, but the reader definitely gets a glimpse at the end into the obstinacy and grandiosity of a brilliant and troubled man.

Whatever opinion scholars have of Bettelheim, this is an extraordinarily eye-opening work for a layman. Just the insights into the magical thinking of children--how fairy tales make sense to them because a parent's abilities to predict behavior, for example, seems magical to them too--is "worth the price of admission" for any parent.

I enjoyed this book, for its symbolism, meanings attributed to fairy tales, psychology contained there in, etc. Gives you a new slant as to how past generations looked at life, and how they told of life, the passages everyone goes through, in fairy-tale form. Very interesting account, somewhat Freudian, but very interesting.

For those who love the written word (and that would be anyone browsing here, I suspect), we all have the desire to infect others with our same literary enthusiasm. And study after study has shown that reading to children is best way to ensure children's success in school. So the question is not DO we read to children, but HOW and WHAT do we read to children.

The answer provided in this book is, I feel, the best. As parents and caretakers we have a natural and healthy instinct to protect children from harm. But if we think back to our own childhoods, we will find them inhabited by all sorts of irrational fears. And if we are realistic, we will admit that these cannot be entirely prevented. Nor, perhaps, ought they to be.

Bettleheim argues that the perils and deliverance from those childhood perils are suggested in fairy tales, though only indirectly. And it is their indirectness that makes them uniquely useful, because children are not always able to consciously understand and articulate their conflicts. And it is this very unspokenness, unrealized nature of the conflicts that makes them easier to grapple with.

This should give pause to any who seek to sanitize children's mythos from ALL depictions of violence. Children's thoughts are full of violence, no matter how idyllic one tries to make the child's circumstances. What we need to teach children is not that violence does not exist, but how to deal with both psychic and physical violence. And while fairy tales ARE violent, the violence is vengeful or retributive, but never senseless. Evil is punished and good wins out. And, as Bettleheim observes, adults are always punished for their rash resorts to violence and ill will, but children are always given opportunities to atone and restore.

Even if (as the reader from or-id asserts) childhood as a unique stage of development was denied in Mideival times, that does not mean that childhood was "invented" by Victorians. These are the same sorts of people who insist that romantic love was invented by French Troubaours. That is absurd and easily refuted by even a cursory review of ancient texts. We see romantic love as far back as we have written texts (see the Epic of Gilgamesh, for plenty of romantic love, some of which is illegal in some states). And for those who doubt that the ancient world was ignorant of the notion of childhood, I refer you to I Corinthians 13:11. Paul, at least, understood that children thought and behaved differently from adults, and I doubt that (inspired though he may have been) he was the only one to have figured it out.

Psychoanalysis has been mostly discredited in the psychological profession, but I think it has some value still. Whether Bettleheim's meanings seem obvious (red a symbol of loss of sexual innocence) or far-fetched (frogs representing sexual fulfillment), they are always thought-provoking. Even if you reject the suppositions of psychoanalysis, or have serious qualms about Bettleheim's career, I still maintain that this is a humane and fascinating book for anyone who loves children, and loves reading to children.

I would go further than Bettleheim on some points, however. Bettleheim believes that the surabondance of royalty themes in fairy tales is because of the child's initial belief that he is the center of the universe. And relatedly, the step-parent motif is a rebellion against the reality principle, when the formerly all-accepting, all-providing mother now demands obedience and chores. I think it goes back to something even more fundamental, more religious and mystical than Bettleheim probably believed and certainly more than he would have dared write about. I believe that we are all children of God, and as such truly DO have a royal parentage. Our mortal parents are custodians entrusted with our growth, but our true parents are God. This understanding, though obscured through a "veil of forgetfulness" still manages to leak out as -- in Wordsworth's phrase -- "intimations of immortality": "Not in entire forgetfulness/And not in utter nakedness/But trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home:/Heaven lies about us in our infancy!"

If these intimations are correct, then ultimately all fairy tales are true. And a "happily ever after" ending awaits all of us who are just and faithful to the end.

Bruno Bettleheim again becomes the fount of great sanity and wisdom. In this seemingly innocent book, on the same statue as Joseph Cambell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," or Ernest Becker's "Denial of Death" and his "Birth and Death of Meaning," or indeed even Freud's "Civilization's and its Discontents," this giant of our era, lays out a map of how we think using the morality of Fairy Tales as his raw material and as a springboard to the real subtext of the book which is: How man is to deal with his own problems of existence.

What he tells us is basically this: that for all peoples of all races, the primary problem of life is developing smoothly into adulthood and overcoming the inherent psychological debilities of youth and immaturity -- namely overcoming narcissistic disappoints, unearned entitlements, self-doubts, oedipal dilemmas, sibling rivalries, relinquishing childhood dependencies, gaining a feeling of selfhood, self-mastery, self-respect and self-worth, and eventually developing a sense of moral obligation, duty and responsibility. In this life project, and at all ages, the unconscious is the most powerful determinant of our behavior. Obviously, not understanding the role that it plays as a determinant in our behavior means that many of us will never fully mature into adulthood. We first need to learn to understand what is going on within our conscious selves in order to then be able better to cope with that which goes on and affects us from the unconscious.

Bettleheim tells us that we can achieve this understanding, and with it an ability to cope, not always through logic and rational comprehension of the nature of the content of the unconscious, but most often by becoming familiar with it through tales, myths, legends, dreams, and daydreams - ruminating, rearranging, and fantasizing about suitable story elements in response to weakly perceived unconscious pressures. By doing this, we learn slowly to fit unconscious content into various aspects of our conscious lives in our own way and at our own speed. That is to say that through our dreams, simulated games, myth-making, and other ways of fantasizing, and even through our art, music and dramas, we learn to better deal with the unconscious content buried deep inside our minds.

It is here that fairy tales for the child, and myths of heroism for the maturing adult, have unequaled value. This is true because they both offer new dimensions of discovery and new modalities for the imagination to cling to. For the adult, especially adult males, myths of heroism open up a shared stage for the playing out of collective subconscious dramas, dramas of narcissism, and of illicit (even Oedipal) desires, of repressed hatred, imaginings of being a hero in ones own self-scripted drama, etc. - all things whose relevant dimensions are embedded deeply within the unconscious.

In various ways, art, our fantasies, that is the imagined stage, the tales of heroism, the dramas upon which they are based, and their respective scripts are but sublimated and simulated ways of release that allow us to play out the things animating our unconscious feelings in a more or less safe and harmless way. The Fairy Tales that we tell our children, are nothing but a stripped-down versions of how we relate to our own unconscious mind.

Bettleheim tells us, the same as does Freud and Becker, that when the unconscious is repressed and its content denied direct entrance into awareness, then it will find indirect ways to express itself and the person's conscious mind will be partially overwhelmed by derivatives of these subconscious elements. They will seep out in less acceptable and less respectable ways. Or else, as the pressures build up and there are no avenues of release, a person is forced to keep such rigid, compulsive control over them that his personality may become severely warped and crippled. But when unconscious material is allowed to escape into consciousness, even to a small extent, and is allowed to work its way through a person's imagination and fantasies, its potential for causing harm - to himself and to others - is often very much reduced. Some of its forces, as is the case with the arts, can in fact be redirected to serve positive purposes.

However, and this is a key point of Bettleheim's analysis, the conventional mode of operating our everyday lives is to run away from things that trouble us even in the least, not to mention things that bother us most. We also teach this lesson to our children -- both directly, by blocking any un-pleasantries from their eyes and from entering their lives -- and indirectly, by our own examples of mental jujitsu where we invariably end up in the land of fantasy and escapism, often a very great distance away from reality. Formless and nameless anxieties, chaos, anger, violent fantasies, sexual repression, pressing everyday problems, etc. are often the source of many of our problems.

But since we have learned to operate on the unwritten cultural law that only conscious reality matters, and that it always should be pleasant and wish-fulfilling, we turn our heads away from the un-pleasantries of life. The dominant American culture, for instance, chooses to pretend that the dark side of America does not exist. In fact a cottage industry has been built on the premise that wish-fulfilling thoughts can somehow "will into existence" a "much dreamed of" problem-free life.

One of the main ways that we get sidelined from finding a direct route to maturity and mastery over our own inner demons and thus reaching complete closure to adulthood, is through the kind of personal denial we engage in when we refuse to face the fact that most of what goes wrong in our lives has to do with our very own human natures. We tell ourselves that most of our problems lie outside ourselves, outside our own carefully build categories and "constructs," outside our basic rules of conduct and our basic natures, that is outside of our own self-proscribed cultures and humanities. But the truth is that even when they are not internally caused, most of the problems driving our lives come from the seven sins that have been driving human nature from time immemorial. They serve to shape our humanity as much as they shape our everyday activities, and certainly as much as anything else does. And of course they do so from deep within the psyche, well beneath consciousness.

According to this great child psychologist, the problems that define our lives are more often than not sublimated spin-offs of negative feelings that we have about ourselves, or that others have about us, or about themselves. Either that or, they are about our respective uncertain relationships to the world outside us. When we don't act aggressively, selfishly, angrily, antisocially, or thoughtlessly, we can usually cope with the other problematic aspects of life, no matter from where they might originate.

As Professor Bettleheim tells us, and as we learned from Dostoevsky's novels, from Shakespeare's dramas, from Ernest Becker's writings, and from Sartre philosophy, as well as from others such as Professor Cornel West, neither psychoanalysis nor existentialism was invented to make life easier for us, but to enable us to accept the problematic nature of life without being defeated by it, or giving in to escapism. As one other reviewer noted, and as Professor West has emphasized in his writings, even Freud's best prescription for life is that we have no choice but to struggle courageously against overwhelming odds if we are to wring any meaning out of our existence.

Anyone who has read Cornel West's Reader would know this and will readily recognize that Bruno Bettleheim's philosophy is the foundation stone upon which West's Chehovian Christianity is built. Only in West's writing have I seen anything quite as powerful as this. This is heady stuff and will make the reader thirst for more. Ten stars.