The Uses of Enchantment

by Bruno Bettelheim

  It is a strangely limited, one-sided picture of adults and life which children are expected to accept as the only correct one. Starving the imagination of the child was expected to extinguish the giants and ogres of the fairy tale—that is, the dark monsters residing in the unconscious—so that these would not obstruct the development of the child’s rational mind. The rational ego was expected to reign supreme from babyhood on! This was not to be achieved by the ego’s conquering the dark forces of the id, but by preventing the child from paying attention to his unconscious or hearing stories which would speak to it. In short, the child would supposedly repress his unpleasant fantasies and have only pleasant ones.*

  Such id-repressing theories do not work, however. What may happen when a child is forced to repress the content of his unconscious may be illustrated by an extreme example. After long therapeutic work, a boy who at the end of his latency period had suddenly become mute explained the origin of his mutism. He said: “My mother washed out my mouth with soap because of all the bad words I used, and these had been pretty bad, I admit. What she did not know was that by washing out all the bad words, she also washed out all the good ones.” In therapy all these bad words were freed, and with this, the good ones also reappeared. Many other things had gone wrong in this boy’s early life; washing his mouth with soap was not the main cause of his mutism, though it was a contributing one.

  The unconscious is the source of raw materials and the basis upon which the ego erects the edifice of our personality. In this simile our fantasies are the natural resources which provide and shape this raw material, making it useful for the ego’s personality-building tasks. If we are deprived of this natural resource, our life remains limited; without fantasies to give us hope, we do not have the strength to meet the adversities of life. Childhood is the time when these fantasies need to be nurtured.

  We do encourage our children’s fantasies; we tell them to paint what they want, or to invent stories. But unfed by our common fantasy heritage, the folk fairy tale, the child cannot invent stories on his own which help him cope with life’s problems. All the stories he can invent are just expressions of his own wishes and anxieties. Relying on his own resources, all the child can imagine are elaborations of where he presently is, since he cannot know where he needs to go, nor how to go about getting there. This is where the fairy tale provides what the child needs most: it begins exactly where the child is emotionally, shows him where he has to go, and how to do it. But the fairy tale does this by implication, in the form of fantasy material which the child can draw on as seems best to him, and by means of images which make it easy for him to comprehend what is essential for him to understand.

  The rationalizations for continuing to forbid fairy tales despite what psychoanalysis revealed about the unconscious, particularly that of children, took many forms. When it could no longer be denied that the child is beset by deep conflicts, anxieties, violent desires, and helplessly tossed about by all kinds of irrational processes, it was concluded that because the child is already afraid of so many things, anything else that looked fearsome should be kept from him. A particular story may indeed make some children anxious, but once they become better acquainted with fairy stories, the fearsome aspects seem to disappear, while the reassuring features become ever more dominant. The original displeasure of anxiety then turns into the great pleasure of anxiety successfully faced and mastered.

  Parents who wish to deny that their child has murderous wishes and wants to tear things and even people into pieces believe that their child must be prevented from engaging in such thoughts (as if this were possible). By denying access to stories which implicitly tell the child that others have the same fantasies, he is left to feel that he is the only one who imagines such things. This makes his fantasies really scary. On the other hand, learning that others have the same or similar fantasies makes us feel that we are a part of humanity, and allays our fear that having such destructive ideas has put us beyond the common pale.

  A strange contradiction is that well-educated parents outlawed fairy tales for their children at just about the time when the findings of psychoanalysis made them aware that, far from being innocent, the mind of the young child is filled with anxious, angry, destructive imaginings.* It is also quite remarkable that these parents, so worried about not increasing their child’s anxieties, remained oblivious to all the reassuring messages in fairy tales.

  The answer to the puzzle may be found in the fact that psychoanalysis also revealed the child’s ambivalent feelings about his parents. It is perturbing to parents to realize that the child’s mind is filled not only by deep love, but also by strong hatred of his parents. Wishing to be loved by their child, parents shrink from exposing him to tales which might encourage him to think of parents as bad or rejecting.

  Parents wish to believe that if a child sees them as stepmothers, witches, or giants, this has nothing to do with them and how they at moments appear to the child, but is only the result of tales he has heard. These parents hope that if their child is prevented from learning about such figures, he will not see his own parents in this image. In a complete reversal of which they remain largely unaware, such parents fool themselves into believing that if they are seen in such form by the child it is due to the stories he has heard, while actually the opposite is true: fairy tales are loved by the child not because the imagery he finds in them conforms to what goes on within him, but because—despite all the angry, anxious thoughts in his mind to which the fairy tale gives body and specific content—these stories always result in a happy outcome, which the child cannot imagine on his own.

  *It is as if Freud’s dictum on the essence of development toward higher humanity consisting of “where there was id, there should be ego” were perverted into its opposite: “where there was id, there should be none of it.” But Freud clearly implied that only the id can provide the ego with the energy necessary to mold unconscious tendencies and use them constructively. Although more recent psychoanalytic theory posits that the ego is also invested from birth with its own energy, an ego which cannot draw on the much larger sources of id energies in addition will be a weak one. Further, an ego which is forced to expend its limited amount of energy on keeping the id’s energy repressed is doubly depleted.

  *Fairy stories stimulate the child’s fantasies—as do many other experiences. Since parental objection to fairy stories is often based on the violent or scary events which occur in these tales, an experimental study of fifth-graders may be mentioned which demonstrates that when a child who has a rich fantasy life—something which fairy tales stimulate—is exposed to aggressive fantasy material as it occurs in fairy stories (in the experiment a film with aggressive content), he responds to this experience with a marked decrease in aggressive behavior. When not stimulated to engage in aggressive fantasies, no reduction in aggressive behavior could be observed (Ephraim Biblow, “Imaginative Play and the Control of Aggressive Behavior,” in Jerome L. Singer, The Child’s World of Make-Believe [New York: Academic Press, 1973]).

  Since fairy tales strongly stimulate a child’s fantasy life, the two concluding sentences of this study may be quoted: “The low-fantasy child, as observed during play, presented himself as more motorically oriented, revealing much action and little thought in play activities. The high-fantasy child in contrast was more highly structured and creative and tended to be verbally rather than physically aggressive.”

  TRANSCENDING INFANCY

  WITH THE HELP OF FANTASY

  If one believed in a grand design to human life, one could admire the wisdom by which it is arranged that a wide variety of psychological events coincide just at the right time, reinforcing each other so that the impact on the young human propels him out of infancy into childhood. Just when the child begins to be tempted by the beckoning of the wider world to move beyond the narrow circle encompassing him and his parents, his oedipal disappointments induce him to detach himself a bit from his parents, who up to this time w
ere the sole source of his physical and psychological sustenance.

  As this happens, the child becomes able to gain some emotional satisfaction from persons who are not part of his immediate family, which compensates to a small degree for his disillusionment with his parents. One could view it as part of this same design that as the child becomes deeply and painfully disenchanted with his parents because they fail to live up to his infantile expectations, he becomes physically and mentally able to provide for some of his wants himself. All of these and many other important developments take place at the same time or in short succession; they are interrelated, each one a function of all the others.

  Because of the child’s growing ability to cope, he can have more contact with others, and with wider aspects of the world. Because he is able to do more, his parents feel the time has come to expect more of the child, and they become less ready to do for him. This change in their relations is an enormous disappointment of the child’s hope that he would always receive endlessly; it is the most severe disillusionment of his young life, made infinitely worse because it is inflicted by those who he believes owe him unlimited care. But this event is also a function of the child’s having more significant contact with the outside world, of his receiving at least some emotional supplies from it, and his growing ability to satisfy some of his own needs to some small degree. Because of his new experiences with the outside world, the child can afford to become aware of the “limitations” of his parents—that is, their shortcomings as seen from the standpoint of his unrealistic expectations of them. In consequence, the child becomes so disgusted with his parents that he ventures to seek satisfaction elsewhere.

  When this comes about, so overwhelming are the new challenges presented to the child by his enlarging experiences, and so very small are his ability to achieve these new things and his chance to solve the problems which his steps toward independence arouse, that he needs fantasy satisfactions in order not to give up in despair. Considerable as the child’s real achievements are, they seem to vanish into insignificance when compared to his failures, if only because he has no comprehension of what is actually possible. This disillusionment may lead to such severe disappointment in himself that the child may give up all effort and completely withdraw into himself, away from the world, unless fantasy comes to his rescue.

  If any one of these various steps the child is taking in growing up could be viewed in isolation, it might be said that the ability to spin fantasies beyond the present is the new achievement which makes all others possible—because it makes bearable the frustrations experienced in reality. If only we could recall how we felt when we were small, or could imagine how utterly defeated a young child feels when his play companions or older siblings temporarily reject him or can obviously do things better than he can, or when adults—worst of all, his parents—seem to make fun of him or belittle him, then we would know why the child often feels like an outcast: a “simpleton.” Only exaggerated hopes and fantasies of future achievements can balance the scales so that the child can go on living and striving.

  How enormous the frustration, disappointment, and despair of the child are at moments of utter, unrelieved defeat can be seen from his temper tantrums, which are the visible expression of the conviction that he can do nothing to improve the “unbearable” conditions of his life. As soon as a child is able to imagine (that is, to fantasize) a favorable solution to his present predicament, temper tantrums disappear—because with hope for the future established, the present difficulty is no longer insufferable. Random physical discharge through kicking and screaming is then replaced by thought or activity designed to reach a desired goal, either now or at some future date. Thus the problems a child encounters and cannot solve at the moment become manageable, because disappointment in the present is mitigated by visions of future victories.

  If a child is for some reason unable to imagine his future optimistically, arrest of development sets in. The extreme example of this can be found in the behavior of the child suffering from infantile autism. He does nothing or intermittently breaks out into severe temper tantrums, but in either case insists that nothing must be altered in his environment and the conditions of his life. All this is the consequence of his complete inability to imagine any change for the better. When one such child after prolonged therapy finally emerged from her total autistic withdrawal and reflected on what characterizes good parents, she said: “They hope for you.” The implication was that her parents had been bad parents because they had failed both to feel hope for her and to give her hope for herself and her future life in this world.

  We know that the more deeply unhappy and despairing we are, the more we need to be able to engage in optimistic fantasies. But these are not available to us at such periods. Then, more than at any other time, we need others to uplift us with their hope for us and our future. No fairy tale all by itself will do this for the child; as the autistic girl reminded us, first we need our parents to instill hope in us. On this firm and real basis—the positive ways in which our parents view us and our future—we can then build castles in the air, half aware that these are just that, but gaining deep reassurance from it nonetheless. While the fantasy is unreal, the good feelings it gives us about ourselves and our future are real, and these real good feelings are what we need to sustain us.

  Every parent responsive to his child’s feeling down and out tells his child that things will take a turn for the better. But the child’s despair is all-encompassing—because he does not know gradations, he feels either in darkest hell or gloriously happy—and therefore nothing but the most perfect everlasting bliss can combat his fear of total devastation at the moment. No reasonable parent can promise his child that perfect bliss is available to him in reality. But by telling his child fairy tales, the parent can encourage him to borrow for his private use fantastic hopes for the future, without misleading him by suggesting that there is reality to such imaginings.*

  Feeling acutely the dissatisfactions which come with being dominated by adults, and dispossessed of the small child’s kingdom where no demands were made on him and it seemed all his wishes were satisfied by his parents, no child can help wishing for a kingdom of his or her own. Realistic statements about what the child may achieve as he grows cannot satisfy or even compare with such extravagant desires.

  What is this kingdom which many fairy-tale heroes gain at the story’s end? Its main characteristic is that we are never told anything about it, not even what the king or queen does. There is no purpose to being the king or queen of this kingdom other than being a ruler rather than being ruled. To have become a king or queen at the conclusion of the story symbolizes a state of true independence, in which the hero feels as secure, satisfied, and happy as the infant felt in his most dependent state, when he was truly well taken care of in the kingdom of his cradle.

  The fairy tale begins with the hero at the mercy of those who think little of him and his abilities, who mistreat him and even threaten his life, as the wicked queen does in “Snow White.” As the story unfolds, the hero is often forced to depend on friendly helpers: creatures of the underworld like the dwarfs in “Snow White,” or magic animals like the birds in “Cinderella.” At the tale’s end the hero has mastered all trials and despite them remained true to himself, or in successfully undergoing them has achieved his true selfhood. He has become an autocrat in the best sense of the word—a self-ruler, a truly autonomous person, not a person who rules over others. In fairy tales, unlike myths, victory is not over others but only over oneself and over villainy (mainly one’s own, which is projected as the hero’s antagonist). If we are told anything about the rule of these kings and queens, it is that they ruled wisely and peacefully, and that they lived happily. This is what maturity ought to consist of: that one rules oneself wisely, and as a consequence lives happily.

  The child understands this very well. No child believes that one day he will become ruler over a kingdom other than the realm of his own life. Th
e fairy story assures him that someday this kingdom can be his, but not without struggle. How the child specifically imagines the “kingdom” depends on his age and state of development, but he never takes it literally. To the younger child, it may simply mean that then nobody will order him around, and that all his wishes will be fulfilled. To the older child, it will also include the obligation to rule—that is, to live and act wisely. But at any age a child interprets becoming king or queen as having gained mature adulthood.

  Since maturity requires a positive solution to the child’s oedipal conflicts, let us consider how the hero gains this kingdom in the fairy tale. In the Greek myth, Oedipus became king by slaying his father and marrying his mother after solving the riddle of the Sphinx, which then killed itself. Solving this riddle required understanding of what the three stages of human development consist of. To a child the greatest riddle is what sex consists of; that is the secret of adults which he wishes to discover. Since solving the riddle of the Sphinx enabled Oedipus to come into his kingdom by marrying his mother, we may assume that this riddle had something to do with sexual knowledge, at least on an unconscious level.

  In many fairy tales, too, solving “the riddle” leads to marriage and gaining the kingdom. For example, in the Brothers Grimm’s story “The Clever Little Tailor,” only the hero is able to correctly guess the two colors of the princess’ hair, and therefore he wins the princess. Similarly, the story of Princess Turandot tells that she can be won only by the man who correctly guesses the answers to her three riddles. Solving the riddle posed by a particular woman stands for the riddle of woman in general, and since marriage usually follows the right solution, it does not seem farfetched that the riddle to be solved is a sexual one: whoever understands the secret which the other sex presents has gained his maturity. But while in the myth of Oedipus the figure whose riddle has been correctly answered destroys itself and marital tragedy follows, in fairy tales the discovery of the secret leads to the happiness of both the person who solved the riddle and the one who posed it.