The Uses of Enchantment

by Bruno Bettelheim

  As the parent in the fairy tale becomes separated into two figures, representative of the opposite feelings of loving and rejecting, so the child externalizes and projects onto a “somebody” all the bad things which are too scary to be recognized as part of oneself.

  The fairy-tale literature does not fail to consider the problematic nature of sometimes seeing Mother as an evil stepmother; in its own way, the fairy tale warns against being swept away too far and too fast by angry feelings. A child easily gives in to his annoyance with a person dear to him, or to his impatience when kept waiting; he tends to harbor angry feelings, and to embark on furious wishes with little thought of the consequences should these come true. Many fairy tales depict the tragic outcome of such rash wishes, engaged in because one desires something too much or is unable to wait until things come about in their good time. Both mental states are typical for the child. Two stories of the Brothers Grimm may illustrate.

  In “Hans, My Hedgehog” a man becomes angry when his great desire for having children is frustrated by his wife’s inability to have any. Finally he gets carried away enough to exclaim, “I want a child, even if it should be a hedgehog.” His wish is granted: his wife begets a child who is a hedgehog on top, while the lower part of his body is that of a boy.*

  In “The Seven Ravens” a newborn child so preoccupies a father’s emotions that he turns his anger against his older children. He sends one of his seven sons to fetch baptismal water for the christening of the infant daughter, an errand on which his six brothers join him. The father, in his anger at being kept waiting, shouts, “I wish all the boys would turn into ravens”—which promptly happens.

  If these fairy stories in which angry wishes come true ended there, they would be merely cautionary tales, warning us not to permit ourselves to be carried away by our negative emotions—something the child is unable to avoid. But the fairy tale knows better than to expect the impossible of the child, and to make him anxious about having angry wishes which he cannot help having. While the fairy tale realistically warns that being carried away by anger or impatience leads to trouble, it reassures that the consequences are only temporary ones, and that good will or deeds can undo all the harm done by bad wishing. Hans the Hedgehog helps a king lost in the forest to return safely home. The king promises to give Hans as a reward the first thing he encounters on his return home, which happens to be his only daughter. Despite Hans’s appearance, the princess keeps her father’s promise and marries Hans the Hedgehog. After the marriage, in the marital bed, Hans at last takes on a fully human form, and eventually he inherits the kingdom.* In “The Seven Ravens” the sister, who was the innocent cause of her brothers being turned into ravens, travels to the end of the world and makes a great sacrifice to undo the spell put on them. The ravens all regain their human form, and happiness is restored.

  These stories tell that, despite the bad consequences which evil wishes have, with good will and effort things can be righted again. There are other tales which go much further and tell the child not to fear having such wishes because, although there are momentary consequences, nothing changes permanently; after all the wishing is done, things are exactly as they were before the wishing began. Such stories exist in many variations all over the globe.

  In the Western world “The Three Wishes” is probably the best-known wish story. In the simplest form of this motif, a man or a woman is granted some wishes, usually three, by a stranger or an animal as reward for some good deed. A man is given this favor in “The Three Wishes,” but he thinks little of it. On his return home his wife presents him with his daily soup for dinner. “ ‘Soup again, I wish I had pudding for a change,’ says he, and promptly the pudding appears.” The wife demands to know how this has happened, and he tells her about his adventure. Furious that he wasted one of his wishes on such a trifle, she exclaims, “I wish the pudding was on your head,” a wish which is immediately fulfilled. “ ‘That’s two wishes gone! I wish the pudding was off my head,’ says the man. And so the three wishes were gone.”27

  Together, these tales warn the child of the possible undesirable consequences of rash wishing, and assure him at the same time that such wishing has little consequence, particularly if one is sincere in one’s desire and efforts to undo the bad results. Maybe even more important is the fact that I cannot recall a single fairy tale in which a child’s angry wishes have any consequence; only those of adults do. The implication is that adults are accountable for what they do in their anger or their silliness, but children are not. If children wish in a fairy tale, they desire only good things; and chance or a good spirit fulfills their desires, often beyond their fondest hopes.

  It is as if the fairy tale, while admitting how human it is to get angry, expects only adults to have sufficient self-control not to let themselves get carried away, since their outlandishly angry wishes come true—but the tales stress the wonderful consequences for a child if he engages in positive wishing or thinking. Desolation does not induce the fairy-tale child to engage in vengeful wishing. The child wishes only for good things, even when he has ample reason to wish that bad things would happen to those who persecute him. Snow White harbors no angry wishes against the evil queen. Cinderella, who has good reason to wish that her stepsisters be punished for their misdeeds, instead wishes them to go to the grand ball.

  Left alone for a few hours, a child can feel as cruelly abused as though he had suffered a lifetime of neglect and rejection. Then, suddenly, his existence turns into complete bliss as his mother appears in the doorway, smiling, maybe even bringing him some little present. What could be more magical than that? How could something so simple have the power to alter his life, unless there were magic involved?

  Radical transformations in the nature of things are experienced by the child on all sides, although we do not share his perceptions. But consider the child’s dealings with inanimate objects: some object—a shoelace or a toy—utterly frustrates the child, to the degree that he feels himself a complete fool. Then in a moment, as if by magic, the object becomes obedient and does his bidding; from being the most dejected of humans, he becomes the happiest. Doesn’t this prove the magic character of the object? Quite a few fairy tales relate how finding a magic object changes the hero’s life; with its help, the fool turns out smarter than his previously preferred siblings. The child who feels himself doomed to be an ugly duckling need not despair; he will grow into a beautiful swan.

  A small child can do little on his own, and this is disappointing to him—so much so that he may give up in despair. The fairy story prevents this by giving extraordinary dignity to the smallest achievement, and suggesting that the most wonderful consequences may grow out of it. Finding a jar or bottle (as in the Brothers Grimm’s story “The Spirit in the Bottle”), befriending an animal or being befriended by it (“Puss-in-Boots”), sharing a piece of bread with a stranger (“The Golden Goose,” another of the Brothers Grimm’s stories)—such little everyday events lead to great things. So the fairy tale encourages the child to trust that his small real achievements are important, though he may not realize it at the moment.

  The belief in such possibilities needs to be nurtured so that the child can accept his disillusionments without being utterly defeated; and beyond this, it can become a challenge to think with confidence about an existence beyond the parental home. The fairy tale’s example provides assurance that the child will receive help in his endeavors in the outside world, and that eventual success will reward his sustained efforts. At the same time, the fairy tale stresses that these events happened once upon a time, in a far-distant land, and makes clear that it offers food for hope, not realistic accounts of what the world is like here and now.

  The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue; that while what these stories tell about does not happen in fact, it must happen as inner experience and personal development; that fairy tales depict in imaginary and symbolic form the essential steps in gr
owing up and achieving an independent existence.

  While fairy tales invariably point the way to a better future, they concentrate on the process of change, rather than describing the exact details of the bliss eventually to be gained. The stories start where the child is at the time, and suggest where he has to go—with emphasis on the process itself. Fairy tales can even show the child the way through that thorniest of thickets, the oedipal period.

  *The motif that parents who too impatiently desire to have children are punished by giving birth to strange mixtures of human and animal beings is an ancient one, and widely distributed. For example, it is the topic of a Turkish tale in which King Solomon effects the restitution of a child to full humanity. In these stories, if the parents treat the misdeveloped child well and with great patience, he is eventually restored as an attractive human being.

  The psychological wisdom of these tales is remarkable: lack of control over emotions on the part of the parent creates a child who is a misfit. In fairy tales and dreams, physical malformation often stands for psychological misdevelopment. In these stories, the upper part of the body including the head is usually animal-like, while the lower part is of normal human form. This indicates that things are wrong with the head—that is, mind—of the child, and not his body. The stories also tell that the damage done to the child through negative feelings can be corrected, through the impact of positive emotions lavished on him, if the parents are sufficiently patient and consistent. The children of angry parents often behave like hedgehogs or porcupines: they seem all spines, so the image of the child that is part hedgehog is most appropriate.

  These are also cautionary tales which warn: Do not conceive children in anger; do not receive them with anger and impatience on their arrival. But, like all good fairy tales, these stories also indicate the right remedies to undo the damage, and the prescription is in line with the best psychological insights of today.

  *This ending is typical for stories belonging to the animal-groom cycle, and will be discussed in connection with these stories (pp. 282 ff.).

  BRINGING ORDER

  INTO CHAOS

  Before and well into the oedipal period (roughly ages three to six or seven), the child’s experience of the world is chaotic, but only as seen from an adult point of view, because chaos implies an awareness of this state of affairs. If this “chaotic” fashion of experiencing the world is all one knows, then it is accepted as the way the world is.

  In the language of the Bible, which expresses the deepest feelings and insights of man, in the beginning the world was “without form.” The way to overcome chaos is also told in the Bible: “God divided the light from darkness.” During and because of the oedipal struggles, the outside world comes to hold more meaning for the child, and he begins to try to make sense of it. He no longer takes for granted that the confused way he sees the world is the only possible and appropriate one. The manner in which the child can bring some order into his world view is by dividing everything into opposites.

  In the later oedipal and post-oedipal ages, this splitting extends to the child himself. The child, like all of us, is at any moment in a welter of contradictory feelings. But while adults have learned to integrate these, the child is overwhelmed by these ambivalences within himself. He experiences the mixture of love and hate, desire and fear within himself as an incomprehensible chaos. He cannot manage feeling at one and the same moment both good and obedient, yet bad and rebellious, although he is. Since he cannot comprehend intermediate stages of degree and intensity, things are either all light or all darkness. One is either all courage or all fear; the happiest or the most miserable; the most beautiful or the ugliest; the smartest or the dumbest; one either loves or hates, never anything in between.

  This is also how the fairy tale depicts the world: figures are ferocity incarnate or unselfish benevolence. An animal is either all-devouring or all-helpful. Every figure is essentially one-dimensional, enabling the child to comprehend its actions and reactions easily. Through simple and direct images the fairy story helps the child sort out his complex and ambivalent feelings, so that these begin to fall each one into a separate place, rather than being all one big muddle.

  As he listens to the fairy tale, the child gets ideas about how he may create order out of the chaos which is his inner life. The fairy tale suggests not only isolating and separating the disparate and confusing aspects of the child’s experience into opposites, but projecting these onto different figures. Even Freud found no better way to help make sense out of the incredible mixture of contradictions which coexist in our mind and inner life than by creating symbols for isolated aspects of the personality. He named these id, ego, and superego. If we, as adults, must take recourse to the creation of separate entities to bring some sensible order into the chaos of our inner experiences, how much greater is the child’s need for this! Today adults use such concepts as id, ego, superego, and ego-ideal to separate our internal experiences and get a better grasp on what they are all about. Unfortunately, in doing so we have lost something which is inherent in the fairy tale: the realization that these externalizations are fictions, useful only for sorting out and comprehending mental processes.*

  When the hero of a fairy tale is the youngest child, or is specifically called “the dummy” or “Simpleton” at the start of the story, this is the fairy tale’s rendering of the original debilitated state of the ego as it begins its struggle to cope with the inner world of drives, and with the difficult problems which the outer world presents.

  The id, not unlike how psychoanalysis views it, is frequently depicted in the form of some animal, standing for our animal nature. Fairy-tale animals come in two forms: dangerous and destructive animals, such as the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood,” or the dragon that devastates an entire country unless each year a virgin is sacrificed to it, in “The Two Brothers,” a Brothers Grimm story; and wise and helpful animals which guide and rescue the hero—as in the same story, “The Two Brothers,” where a group of helpful animals revives the dead hero and gains him his just reward of the princess and his kingdom. Both dangerous and helpful animals stand for our animal nature, our instinctual drives. The dangerous ones symbolize the untamed id, not yet subjected to ego and superego control, in all its dangerous energy. The helpful animals represent our natural energy—again the id—but now made to serve the best interests of the total personality. There are also some animals, usually white birds such as doves, which symbolize the superego.

  *Giving the inner processes separate names—id, ego, superego—made them entities, each with its own propensities. When we consider the emotional connotations these abstract terms of psychoanalysis have for most people using them, then we begin to see that these abstractions are not all that different from the personifications of the fairy tale. When we speak of the asocial and unreasonable id pushing the weak ego around, or the ego doing the superego’s bidding, these scientific similes are not much different from the allegories of the fairy tale. In the latter, the poor and weak child is confronted by the powerful witch that knows only its own desires and acts on them, without regard to any consequences. When the meek tailor in the Brothers Grimm’s “The Valiant Little Tailor” manages to subdue two huge giants by making them fight each other, is he not acting as the weak ego does when it plays id against superego and, by neutralizing their opposite energies, gains rational control over these irrational forces?

  Many errors in understanding how our minds work could be avoided if modern man would at all times remain aware that these abstract concepts are nothing but convenient handles for manipulating ideas which, without such externalization, would be too difficult to comprehend. There is in actuality, of course, no separation between them, just as there is no real separation between mind and body.

  “THE QUEEN BEE”

  ACHIEVING INTEGRATION

  No single fairy tale does justice to the richness of all the images which give external body to the most complex inner processes,
but a little-known story by the Brothers Grimm called “The Queen Bee” may illustrate the symbolic struggle of personality integration against chaotic disintegration. A bee is a particularly apt image for the two opposite aspects of our nature, since the child knows that the bee produces sweet honey but can also sting painfully. He knows, too, that the bee works hard to achieve its positive propensities, collecting the pollen out of which it produces the honey.

  In “The Queen Bee” the two older sons of a king go out to seek adventure and live such wild, dissolute lives that they never return home. In short, they live an id-dominated existence, without any regard for the requirements of reality or the justified demands and criticisms of the superego. The third and youngest son, called Simpleton, sets out to find them, and through persistence succeeds. But they mock him for thinking that he in his simplicity could get through life better than they, who are supposedly so much more clever. On the surface the two brothers are right: as the story unfolds, Simpleton would be just as incapable of mastering life, represented by the difficult tasks they are all asked to perform, as they are—except that he proves able to call for help on his inner resources, represented by the helpful animals.