The Uses of Enchantment

by Bruno Bettelheim

  After we have been made to understand that these two are the same person in different forms, the porter is invited into the palace, where on seven consecutive days its owner tells of his seven fabulous voyages. In these travels he meets with outrageous perils, from which he is miraculously rescued to return home with great fortunes. During these accounts, to further emphasize the identity of the poor porter and the fabulously rich voyager, the latter says, “Know, O Porter, that thy name is even as mine” and “thou art become my brother.” The force which drives him to seek such adventures the voyager calls “the old bad man within me” and “the carnal man … [whose] heart is naturally prone to evil”—apt images of a person who gives in to the proddings of his id.

  Why does this fairy tale consist of seven parts, and why do the two protagonists separate each day only to reunite on the next? Seven is the number of days in a week; in fairy tales the number seven often stands for every day of the week and is also a symbol of each day of our life. Thus it seems the story tells that as long as we live there are two different aspects to our existence, as the two Sindbads are both the same and different, one having a hard life in reality, the other having a life of fantastic adventures. Another way to interpret this is to view these opposite existences as the day and night views of life—as waking and dreaming, as reality and fantasy, or as the conscious and the unconscious realms of our being. Seen this way, the story tells mainly how different life is when viewed from the two different perspectives of the ego and the id.

  The story begins by telling how Sindbad the Porter, who was “carrying a heavy load, became exceedingly weary, the heat and the weight alike oppressing him.” Saddened by the hardships of his existence, he speculates on what a rich man’s life may be like. Sindbad the Seaman’s stories may be viewed as fantasies in which the poor porter engages to escape his burdensome life. The ego, exhausted by its tasks, then permits itself to be overwhelmed by the id. The id, in contrast to the reality-oriented ego, is the seat of our wildest wishes, wishes that can lead to satisfaction or to extreme danger. This is given body in the seven stories of Sindbad the Seaman’s voyages. Carried away by what he recognizes as “the bad man within me,” Sindbad the Seaman desires fantastic adventures, and encounters horrible dangers which are akin to nightmares: giants who roast human beings on spits before eating them; evil creatures that ride Sindbad as if he were a horse; serpents which threaten to swallow him alive; huge birds that carry him through the sky. Eventually the wish-fulfilling fantasies win out over the anxious ones, as he is rescued and returns home with great riches to a life of leisure and satisfaction. But each day the requirements of reality must also be met. The id having held sway for a time, the ego reasserts itself and Sindbad the Porter returns to his everyday life of hard labor.

  The fairy tale helps us to understand ourselves better, as in the story the two sides of our ambivalences are isolated and projected each onto a different figure. We can visualize these ambivalences much better when the instinctual id pressures are projected onto the intrepid, immensely rich voyager who survives when all others are destroyed, and brings home unheard-of treasure to boot, while the opposite, reality-oriented ego tendencies are embodied in the hard-working, poor porter. What Sindbad the Porter (representing our ego) has too little of—imagination, ability to see beyond the immediate surroundings—Sindbad the Seaman has too much of—since he says that he cannot be satisfied with a normal life “of ease and comfort and repose.”

  When the fairy story indicates that these two very different persons are actually “brothers under the skin,” it guides the child toward the preconscious realization that these two figures are really two parts of one and the same person; that the id is as much an integral part of our personality as the ego. One of the great merits of this tale is that Sindbad the Seaman and Sindbad the Porter are equally appealing figures; neither of the two sides of our nature is denied its attractiveness, importance, validity.

  Unless to some measure a separation of our complex inner tendencies has been accomplished in our mind, we have no comprehension of the sources of our confusion about ourselves, about how we are torn between opposite feelings, and our need to integrate these. Such integration requires the realization that there are discordant aspects to our personality, and what these are. “Sindbad the Seaman and Sindbad the Porter” suggests both the isolation of the discordant aspects of our psyche, and that these belong with each other and must be integrated—the two Sindbads part company each day, but come together again after each separation.

  When viewed in isolation, a relative weakness of this fairy tale is that at its end it fails to express symbolically the need for the integration of the disparate aspects of our personality which have been projected onto the two Sindbads. If this were a fairy tale of the Western world, it would end with the two living happily together ever after. As it is, the listener feels somewhat let down by the story’s end, as he wonders why these two brothers continue to separate and come together anew each day. It would seem on the surface to make much better sense if they settled down to live together permanently in complete harmony, an ending which would symbolically express the hero’s successful achievement of psychic integration.

  But if that were the story’s end, there would be little reason to continue with the telling of fairy tales the next night. “Sindbad the Seaman and Sindbad the Porter” is part of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments.* According to the arrangement of the Thousand and One Nights, Sindbad the Seaman’s seven voyages were actually told over thirty nights.

  *The collection of fairy tales which became known as Thousand and One Nights or, in Burton’s translation, as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, is of Indian and Persian origin and can be traced as early as the tenth century. The number 1001 is not to be taken literally. On the contrary, “thousand” in Arabic means “innumerable,” so 1001 signifies an infinite number. Later compilers and translators took this number literally and arrived at a collection which contained this number of stories by subdividing and adding fairy tales.30

  THE FRAME STORY OF

  THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS

  Since the stories of the two Sindbads are part of such a long cycle of fairy tales, the final resolution—or integration—occurs only at the very end of The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Therefore we must now consider the frame story which introduces and ends the entire cycle.31 King Shahryar is deeply disillusioned with women and a viciously angry man because he has found out that not only has his wife betrayed him with his black slaves, but that the same thing had happened to his brother, King Shahzeman; and further, that even a most powerful and cunning Jinny is continually betrayed by a woman he believes to be most carefully locked up.

  King Shahryar has had his eyes opened to his wife’s betrayal by his brother, King Shahzeman. About the latter we are told: “He could not forget the perfidy of his wife and grief grew on him more and more and his color changed and his body became weak.” When questioned by King Shahryar about the reasons for his decline, King Shahzeman answers: “O my brother, I have an internal wound.” Since his brother seems to be a double for King Shahryar, we can assume that he also suffers terribly from an internal wound: the belief that nobody could truly love him.

  King Shahryar, having lost all trust in mankind, decides that henceforth he will give no woman a chance to betray him ever again, and that he will live a life of lust only. From then on, he sleeps each night with a virgin, who is killed the following morning. Finally, no nubile virgin is left in his kingdom but Scheherazade, the daughter of the king’s vizier. The vizier has no intention of sacrificing his daughter, but she insists that she wishes to become “the means of deliverance.” She accomplishes this by telling each night for a thousand nights a story which so enthralls the king that he does not have her killed because he wishes to hear the story’s continuation on the following night.

  Delivery from death through the telling of fairy tales is a motif which starts the cycle; it also reappear
s throughout the cycle, and ends it. For example, in the very first of the 1001 tales, “The Story of the Three Sheiks,” a Jinny threatens to destroy a merchant but is so taken by the merchant’s story that he spares the merchant. At the cycle’s end, the king declares his trust in and love for Scheherazade; he is cured forever of his hatred for women by Scheherazade’s love, and they live happily together for the rest of their lives, or so we are given to understand.

  According to the frame story, two protagonists, one male and one female, meet in the great crises of their lives: the king disgusted with life and full of hatred of women; Scheherazade fearing for her life, but determined to achieve his and her deliverance. She attains her goal through the telling of many fairy tales; no single story can accomplish it, for our psychological problems are much too complex and difficult of solution. Only a wide variety of fairy tales could provide the impetus for such catharsis. It takes nearly three years of continued telling of fairy tales to free the king of his deep depression, to achieve his cure. It requires his attentive listening to fairy tales for a thousand nights to reintegrate his completely disintegrated personality. (Here it should be recalled that in Hindu medicine—and the Thousand and One Nights cycle is of Indian-Persian origin—the mentally deranged person is told a fairy story, contemplation of which will help him overcome his emotional disturbance.)

  Fairy tales have meaning on many different levels. On another level of meaning, the two protagonists in this story stand for the warring tendencies within us which, if we fail to integrate them, will surely destroy us. The king symbolizes a person completely dominated by his id because his ego, due to severe disappointments in life, has lost its strength to keep his id in bounds. After all, the task of the ego is to protect us against devastating deprivation, which in the story is symbolized by the king’s being sexually betrayed; if the ego fails to do so, it loses its power to guide our lives.

  The other figure of the frame story, Scheherazade, represents the ego, as is clearly suggested by our being told that “she had collected a thousand books of chronicles of past peoples and bygone poets. Moreover, she had read books of science and medicine; her memory was stored with verses and stories and folklore and the sayings of kings and sages, and she was wise, witty, prudent and well-bred”—an exhaustive enumeration of ego attributes. Thus, uncontrolled id (the king) in a long-drawn-out process becomes finally civilized through the impact of an ego incarnate. But it is an ego very much dominated by the superego, so much so that Scheherazade is determined to risk her life. She says: “Either I will be the means of the deliverance of the daughters of the Muslims from slaughter or I will die and perish as others have perished.” Her father tries to dissuade her and admonishes her: “Do not thus adventure thy life!” But nothing can deter her from her purpose, as she insists: “It must be so.”

  In Scheherazade we thus see a superego-dominated ego which has become so cut off from selfish id that it is ready to risk the person’s very existence to obey a moral obligation; in the king, an id which has cut loose from ego and superego. Having such a strong ego, Scheherazade enters her moral mission with a plan: she will arrange it so that she can tell the king a story of such an intriguing nature that he will want to hear the rest of it, and for that reason will spare her life. And indeed when the morning dawns and she interrupts her story, the king says to himself: “I will not kill her till I hear the rest of the story!” But her entrancing stories, the continuation of which the king wishes to hear, postpone her death only from day to day. For the “deliverance” Scheherazade has made her goal, more is needed.

  Only a person whose ego has learned to draw on the positive energies of the id for its constructive purposes can then set that ego to control and civilize the murderous propensities of the id. Only when Scheherazade’s love for the king further inspires her storytelling—that is, when superego (the wish to deliver “the daughters of the Muslims from slaughter”) and id (her love for the king, whom she now also wishes to deliver from his hatred and depression) both endow the ego—has she become a fully integrated person. Such a person, the frame story tells, is able to deliver the world from evil as she gains happiness for herself and for the dark other, who believed that none was available to him. As she declares her love for the king, he declares his for her. What greater testimony can we have to the power of all fairy tales to change our personality than the ending of this one tale, the frame story of Thousand and One Nights: murderous hatred has been changed into enduring love.

  One more element of the frame story of Thousand and One Nights is worth mentioning. Scheherazade from the very beginning expresses the hope that telling the fairy tales may help her to “turn the king from his custom,” but for this she needs the help of her little sister Dunayazad, whom she instructs what to do: “When I go up to the Sultan, I will send after thee, and when thou comest to me and seest that the king has done his will of me, do thou say to me, ‘O my sister, an thou be not asleep, tell us some of thy delightful stories, to pass away the watches of this our night.’ ” Thus, in a fashion, Scheherazade and the king are as husband and wife, and Dunayazad is like their child. It is her spoken wish to hear fairy tales which forms the first bond between the king and Scheherazade. At the cycle’s end Dunayazad is replaced by a little boy, the king’s and Scheherazade’s son, whom she brings to the king as she declares her love for him. The integration of the king’s personality is sealed by his having become the father of a family.

  But before we can achieve mature integration of our personality such as that projected in the figure of the king at the end of Thousand and One Nights, we have to struggle through many developmental crises, two of which, closely connected to each other, are among the most difficult to master.

  The first of them centers on the question of personality integration: Who am I really? Given the contradictory tendencies residing within me, which of them should I respond to? The fairy-tale answer is the same one which psychoanalysis offers: To avoid being tossed about and, in extreme cases, torn apart by our ambivalences requires that we integrate them. Only in this way can we achieve a unified personality able to meet successfully, with inner security, the difficulties of living. Inner integration is not something that is achieved once and for all; it is a task that confronts us all our lives, although in different forms and degrees. Fairy tales do not present such integration as a lifelong endeavor; this would be too discouraging to the child, who finds it difficult to achieve even temporary integration of his ambivalences. Instead, each tale projects at its “happy” ending the integration of some inner conflict. Since there are innumerable fairy tales, each having some different form of a basic conflict for its topic, in their combination these stories demonstrate that in life we encounter many conflicts which we must master, each at its time.

  The second very difficult developmental crisis is the oedipal conflict. It is a series of painful and confusing experiences through which the child becomes truly himself if he succeeds in separating himself from his parents. To do so, he must free himself from the power his parents have over him and—much more difficult—from the power he has given them out of his anxiety and dependency needs, and from his wish that they should forever belong only to him, as he feels he has belonged to them.

  Most of the fairy stories discussed in the first part of this book project the need for inner integration, while those in Part Two deal also with oedipal problems. In considering them we shall have moved from the most famous fairy-tale cycle of the Eastern world to the germinal tragedy of Western drama and—according to Freud—of life for all of us.

  TALES OF TWO BROTHERS

  Unlike “Brother and Sister,” in other fairy tales in which two protagonists—usually brothers—stand for seemingly incompatible aspects of the human personality, the two usually separate after an original period of having been united, and then have different fates. In these fairy tales—which, though little noticed today, are among the oldest and most widely disseminated ones—the stay-at-home b
rother and the adventurous one remain in touch through magic. When the adventurous brother perishes because he has permitted himself to live in accordance with his desires or to disregard dangers, his brother sets out to rescue him, succeeds, and forever after the two live happily reunited. The details vary; sometimes—though rarely—instead of two brothers, there are two sisters, or a brother and a sister. What all these stories have in common are features which suggest the identity of the two heroes, one of whom is cautious and reasonable, but ready to risk his life to rescue the other brother, who foolishly exposes himself to terrible perils; and also some magic object, a life token, which usually disintegrates as soon as one dies, serving as the sign for the other to set out on the rescue.

  The motif of the two brothers is central to the oldest fairy tale, which was found in an Egyptian papyrus of 1250 B.C.32 In over three thousand years since then it has taken on many forms. One study enumerates 770 different versions, but probably there are many more.33 In some versions one meaning becomes more prominent, in others, another. The full flavor of a fairy story can best be gained by not only retelling it or by hearing it many times—then some detail at first overlooked becomes ever more meaningful, or is seen in a new light—but also through becoming acquainted with the same motif in several variations.

  In all variations of this tale, the two figures symbolize opposite aspects of our nature, impelling us to act in contrary ways. In “Brother and Sister,” the choices are whether to follow the proddings of our animal nature or to restrain the expression of our physical desires for the sake of our humanity. The figures thus give concrete embodiment to an internal dialogue that we engage in when we consider what course to take.