The Uses of Enchantment
Page 1
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
The Uses of
Enchantment
Bruno Bettelheim was born in Vienna in 1903 and received his doctorate at the University of Vienna. He came to America in 1939. For many years he was Distinguished Professor of Education and Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Chicago. His books include Love Is Not Enough, Symbolic Wounds, Truants from Life, The Informed Heart, Paul and Mary, Dialogues with Mothers, Social Change and Prejudice (with M. B. Janowitz), The Empty Fortress, Children of the Dream, A Home for the Heart, Surviving and Other Essays, On Learning to Read (with Karen Zelan), Freud and Man’s Soul, and A Good Enough Parent. In 1977 he won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Uses of Enchantment. Bettelheim died in 1990.
ALSO BY BRUNO BETTELHEIM
Freud and Man’s Soul
Freud’s Vienna and Other Essays
A Good Enough Parent
VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MAY 2010
Copyright © 1975, 1976 by Bruno Bettelheim
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1976, and subsequently in paperback by Vintage Books, in 1989.
Portions of this book originally appeared in The New Yorker.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bettelheim, Bruno.
The uses of enchantment.
Bibliography: p
1. Fairy tales—History and criticism.
2. Psychoanalysis. 3. Folk-lore and children.
I. Title.
[GR550.B47 1977] 398′.45 76-41020
eISBN: 978-0-307-77352-4
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1_r1
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction:
The Struggle for Meaning
PART ONE: A POCKETFUL OF MAGIC
Life Divined from the Inside
“The Fisherman and the Jinny”:
Fairy Tale Compared to Fable
Fairy Tale versus Myth:
Optimism versus Pessimism
“The Three Little Pigs”:
Pleasure Principle versus Reality Principle
The Child’s Need for Magic
Vicarious Satisfaction versus Conscious Recognition
The Importance of Externalization:
Fantasy Figures and Events
Transformations:
The Fantasy of the Wicked Stepmother
Bringing Order into Chaos
“The Queen Bee”:
Achieving Integration
“Brother and Sister”:
Unifying Our Dual Nature
“Sindbad the Seaman and Sindbad the Porter”:
Fancy versus Reality
The Frame Story of Thousand and One Nights
Tales of Two Brothers
“The Three Languages”:
Building Integration
“The Three Feathers”:
The Youngest Child as Simpleton
Oedipal Conflicts and Resolutions:
The Knight in Shining Armor and the Damsel in Distress
Fear of Fantasy:
Why Were Fairy Tales Outlawed?
Transcending Infancy with the Help of Fantasy
“The Goose Girl”:
Achieving Autonomy
Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation
On the Telling of Fairy Stories
PART TWO: IN FAIRY LAND
“Hansel and Gretel”
“Little Red Riding Hood”
“Jack and the Beanstalk”
The Jealous Queen in “Snow White”
and the Myth of Oedipus
“Snow White”
“Goldilocks and the Three Bears”
“The Sleeping Beauty”
“Cinderella”
The Animal-Groom Cycle of Fairy Tales
Notes
Bibliography
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people were involved in the creation of fairy tales. Many people also contributed to the writing of this book. Foremost were the children, whose responses made me aware of the importance of fairy stories in their lives; and psychoanalysis, which permitted me access to the stories’ deeper meaning. It was my mother who opened to me the magic world of fairy tales; without her influence this book would not have been written. In writing it, I received helpful suggestions from friends who took a kind interest in my efforts. For their suggestions I am grateful to Marjorie and Al Flarsheim, Frances Gitelson, Elizabeth Goldner, Robert Gottlieb, Joyce Jack, Paul Kramer, Ruth Marquis, Jacqui Sanders, Linnea Vacca, and many others.
Joyce Jack edited the manuscript; it is thanks to her patient and extremely sensitive efforts that it has assumed its present form. I was fortunate to find in Robert Gottlieb the rare publisher who combines finely perceptive and therefore most encouraging understanding with the sound critical attitude which makes him the most desirable final editor an author could wish for.
Last, but certainly not least, I wish to acknowledge gratefully the generous support of the Spencer Foundation, which made it possible for me to write this book. The sympathetic understanding and the friendship of its president, H. Thomas James, provided much-appreciated encouragement for my undertaking.
INTRODUCTION:
THE STRUGGLE FOR MEANING
If we hope to live not just from moment to moment, but in true consciousness of our existence, then our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives. It is well known how many have lost the will to live, and have stopped trying, because such meaning has evaded them. An understanding of the meaning of one’s life is not suddenly acquired at a particular age, not even when one has reached chronological maturity. On the contrary, gaining a secure understanding of what the meaning of one’s life may or ought to be—this is what constitutes having attained psychological maturity. And this achievement is the end result of a long development: at each age we seek, and must be able to find, some modicum of meaning congruent with how our minds and understanding have already developed.
Contrary to the ancient myth, wisdom does not burst forth fully developed like Athena out of Zeus’s head; it is built up, small step by small step, from most irrational beginnings. Only in adulthood can an intelligent understanding of the meaning of one’s existence in this world be gained from one’s experiences in it. Unfortunately, too many parents want their children’s minds to function as their own do—as if mature understanding of ourselves and the world, and our ideas about the meaning of life, did not have to develop as slowly as our bodies and minds.
Today, as in times past, the most important and also the most difficult task in raising a child is helping him to find meaning in life. Many growth experiences are needed to achieve this. The child, as he develops, must learn step by step to understand himself better; with this he becomes more able to understand others, and eventually can relate to them in ways which are mutually satisfying and meaningful.
To find deeper meaning, one must become able to transcend the narrow confines of a self-centered existence and believe that one will make a significant contribution to life—if not right now, then at some future time. This feeling is necessary if a person is to be satisfied with himself and with what he is doing. In order not to be at the mercy of the vagaries
of life, one must develop one’s inner resources, so that one’s emotions, imagination, and intellect mutually support and enrich one another. Our positive feelings give us the strength to develop our rationality; only hope for the future can sustain us in the adversities we unavoidably encounter.
As an educator and therapist of severely disturbed children, my main task was to restore meaning to their lives. This work made it obvious to me that if children were reared so that life was meaningful to them, they would not need special help. I was confronted with the problem of deducing what experiences in a child’s life are most suited to promote his ability to find meaning in his life; to endow life in general with more meaning. Regarding this task, nothing is more important than the impact of parents and others who take care of the child; second in importance is our cultural heritage, when transmitted to the child in the right manner. When children are young, it is literature that carries such information best.
Given this fact, I became deeply dissatisfied with much of the literature intended to develop the child’s mind and personality, because it fails to stimulate and nurture those resources he needs most in order to cope with his difficult inner problems. The preprimers and primers from which he is taught to read in school are designed to teach the necessary skills, irrespective of meaning. The overwhelming bulk of the rest of so-called “children’s literature” attempts to entertain or to inform, or both. But most of these books are so shallow in substance that little of significance can be gained from them. The acquisition of skills, including the ability to read, becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one’s life.
We all tend to assess the future merits of an activity on the basis of what it offers now. But this is especially true for the child, who, much more than the adult, lives in the present and, although he has anxieties about his future, has only the vaguest notions of what it may require or be like. The idea that learning to read may enable one later to enrich one’s life is experienced as an empty promise when the stories the child listens to, or is reading at the moment, are vacuous. The worst feature of these children’s books is that they cheat the child of what he ought to gain from the experience of literature: access to deeper meaning, and that which is meaningful to him at his stage of development.
For a story truly to hold the child’s attention, it must entertain him and arouse his curiosity. But to enrich his life, it must stimulate his imagination; help him to develop his intellect and to clarify his emotions; be attuned to his anxieties and aspirations; give full recognition to his difficulties, while at the same time suggesting solutions to the problems which perturb him. In short, it must at one and the same time relate to all aspects of his personality—and this without ever belittling but, on the contrary, giving full credence to the seriousness of the child’s predicaments, while simultaneously promoting confidence in himself and in his future.
In all these and many other respects, of the entire “children’s literature”—with rare exceptions—nothing can be as enriching and satisfying to child and adult alike as the folk fairy tale. True, on an overt level fairy tales teach little about the specific conditions of life in modern mass society; these tales were created long before it came into being. But more can be learned from them about the inner problems of human beings, and of the right solutions to their predicaments in any society, than from any other type of story within a child’s comprehension. Since the child at every moment of his life is exposed to the society in which he lives, he will certainly learn to cope with its conditions, provided his inner resources permit him to do so.
Just because his life is often bewildering to him, the child needs even more to be given the chance to understand himself in this complex world with which he must learn to cope. To be able to do so, the child must be helped to make some coherent sense out of the turmoil of his feelings. He needs ideas on how to bring his inner house into order, and on that basis be able to create order in his life. He needs—and this hardly requires emphasis at this moment in our history—a moral education which subtly, and by implication only, conveys to him the advantages of moral behavior, not through abstract ethical concepts but through that which seems tangibly right and therefore meaningful to him.
The child finds this kind of meaning through fairy tales. Like many other modern psychological insights, this was anticipated long ago by poets. The German poet Schiller wrote: “Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told to me in my childhood than in the truth that is taught by life.” (The Piccolomini, III, 4.)
Through the centuries (if not millennia) during which, in their retelling, fairy tales became ever more refined, they came to convey at the same time overt and covert meanings—came to speak simultaneously to all levels of the human personality, communicating in a manner which reaches the uneducated mind of the child as well as that of the sophisticated adult. Applying the psychoanalytic model of the human personality, fairy tales carry important messages to the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious mind, on whatever level each is functioning at the time. By dealing with universal human problems, particularly those which preoccupy the child’s mind, these stories speak to his budding ego and encourage its development, while at the same time relieving preconscious and unconscious pressures. As the stories unfold, they give conscious credence and body to id pressures and show ways to satisfy these that are in line with ego and superego requirements.
But my interest in fairy tales is not the result of such a technical analysis of their merits. It is, on the contrary, the consequence of asking myself why, in my experience, children—normal and abnormal alike, and at all levels of intelligence—find folk fairy tales more satisfying than all other children’s stories.
The more I tried to understand why these stories are so successful at enriching the inner life of the child, the more I realized that these tales, in a much deeper sense than any other reading material, start where the child really is in his psychological and emotional being. They speak about his severe inner pressures in a way that the child unconsciously understands, and—without belittling the most serious inner struggles which growing up entails—offer examples of both temporary and permanent solutions to pressing difficulties.
When a grant from the Spencer Foundation provided the leisure to study what contributions psychoanalysis can make to the education of children—and since reading and being read to are essential means of education—it seemed appropriate to use this opportunity to explore in greater detail and depth why folk fairy tales are so valuable in the upbringing of children. My hope is that a proper understanding of the unique merits of fairy tales will induce parents and teachers to assign them once again to that central role in the life of the child they held for centuries.
Fairy Tales and the Existential Predicament
In order to master the psychological problems of growing up—overcoming narcissistic disappointments, oedipal dilemmas, sibling rivalries; becoming able to relinquish childhood dependencies; gaining a feeling of selfhood and of self-worth, and a sense of moral obligation —a child needs to understand what is going on within his conscious self so that he can also cope with that which goes on in his unconscious. He can achieve this understanding, and with it the ability to cope, not through rational comprehension of the nature and content of his unconscious, but by becoming familiar with it through spinning out daydreams—ruminating, rearranging, and fantasizing about suitable story elements in response to unconscious pressures. By doing this, the child fits unconscious content into conscious fantasies, which then enable him to deal with that content. It is here that fairy tales have unequaled value, because they offer new dimensions to the child’s imagination which would be impossible for him to discover as truly on his own. Even more important, the form and structure of fairy tales suggest images to the child by which he can structure his daydreams and with them give better direction to his life.
In child or adult, the unconscious is a powerful determinant of behavior. Whe
n the unconscious is repressed and its content denied entrance into awareness, then eventually the person’s conscious mind will be partially overwhelmed by derivatives of these unconscious elements, or else he is forced to keep such rigid, compulsive control over them that his personality may become severely crippled. But when unconscious material is to some degree permitted to come to awareness and worked through in imagination, its potential for causing harm—to ourselves or others—is much reduced; some of its forces can then be made to serve positive purposes. However, the prevalent parental belief is that a child must be diverted from what troubles him most: his formless, nameless anxieties, and his chaotic, angry, and even violent fantasies. Many parents believe that only conscious reality or pleasant and wish-fulfilling images should be presented to the child—that he should be exposed only to the sunny side of things. But such one-sided fare nourishes the mind only in a one-sided way, and real life is not all sunny.
There is a widespread refusal to let children know that the source of much that goes wrong in life is due to our very own natures—the propensity of all men for acting aggressively, asocially, selfishly, out of anger and anxiety. Instead, we want our children to believe that, inherently, all men are good. But children know that they are not always good; and often, even when they are, they would prefer not to be. This contradicts what they are told by their parents, and therefore makes the child a monster in his own eyes.
The dominant culture wishes to pretend, particularly where children are concerned, that the dark side of man does not exist, and professes a belief in an optimistic meliorism. Psychoanalysis itself is viewed as having the purpose of making life easy—but this is not what its founder intended. 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 seem like overwhelming odds can man succeed in wringing meaning out of his existence.