The Uses of Enchantment

by Bruno Bettelheim

  Things are very different in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” This story tells that while belief in magic can help in daring to meet the world on our own, in the last analysis we must take the initiative and be willing to run the risks involved in mastering life. When Jack is given the magic seeds, he climbs the beanstalk on his own initiative, not because somebody else suggested it. Jack uses his body’s strength skillfully in climbing the beanstalk, and risks his life three times to gain the magic objects. At the end of the story he cuts down the beanstalk and in this way makes secure his possession of the magic objects which he has gained through his own cunning.

  Giving up oral dependency is acceptable only if the child can find security in a realistic—or, more likely, a fantastically exaggerated—belief in what his body and its organs will do for him. But a child sees in sexuality not something based on a relation between a man and a woman, but something that he can achieve all by himself. Disappointed in his mother, a little boy is not likely to accept the idea that to achieve his masculinity he requires a woman. Without such (unrealistic) belief in himself, the child is not able to meet the world. The story tells that Jack looked for work, but didn’t succeed in finding it; he is not yet able to manage realistically; this the man who gives him the magic seeds understands, although his mother does not. Only trust in what his own body—or, more specifically, his budding sexuality—can achieve for him permits the child to give up reliance on oral satisfaction; this is another reason why Jack is ready to exchange cow for seeds.

  If his mother would accept Jack’s wish to believe that his seeds and what they eventually may grow into are as valuable now as cow milk was in the past, then Jack would have less need to take recourse to fantasy satisfactions, such as the belief in magic phallic powers as symbolized by the huge beanstalk. Instead of approving of Jack’s first act of independence and initiative—exchanging the cow for seeds—his mother ridicules what he has done, is angry with him for it, beats him, and, worst of all, falls back on the exercise of her depriving oral power: as punishment for having shown initiative, Jack is sent to bed without being given any food.

  There, while he is in bed, reality having proven so disappointing, fantasy satisfaction takes over. The psychological subtlety of fairy stories which gives what they tell the ring of truth is shown once more in the fact that it is during the night that the seeds grow into the huge beanstalk. No normal boy could during the day exaggerate so fantastically the hopes which his newly discovered masculinity evokes in him. But during the night, in his dreams, it appears to him in extravagant images, such as the beanstalk on which he will climb to the gates of heaven. The story tells that when Jack awakes, his room is partly dark, the beanstalk shutting off the light. This is another hint that all that takes place—Jack’s climbing into the sky on the beanstalk, his encounters with the ogre, etc.—is but dreams, dreams which give a boy hope for the great things he will one day accomplish.

  The fantastic growth of the humble but magic seeds during the night is understood by children as a symbol of the miraculous power and of the satisfactions Jack’s sexual development can bring about: the phallic phase is replacing the oral one; the beanstalk has replaced Milky White. On this beanstalk the child will climb into the sky to achieve a higher existence.

  But, the story warns, this is not without its great dangers. Getting stuck in the phallic phase is little progress over fixation on the oral phase. Only when the relative independence acquired due to the new social and sexual development is used to solve the old oedipal problems will it lead to true human progress. Hence Jack’s dangerous encounters with the ogre, as the oedipal father. But Jack also receives help from the ogre’s wife, without which he would be destroyed by the ogre. How insecure Jack in “Jack and the Beanstalk” is about his newly discovered masculine strength is illustrated by his “regression” to orality whenever he feels threatened: he hides twice in the oven, and finally in a “copper,” a large cooking vessel. His immaturity is further suggested by his stealing the magic objects which are the ogre’s possessions, which he gets away with only because the ogre is asleep.* Jack’s essential unreadiness to trust his newly found masculinity is indicated by his asking the ogre’s wife for food because he is so hungry.

  In fairy-tale fashion, this story depicts the stages of development a boy has to go through to become an independent human being, and shows how this is possible, even enjoyable, despite all dangers, and most advantageous. Giving up relying on oral satisfactions—or rather having been forced out of it by circumstances—and replacing them with phallic satisfaction as solution to all of life’s problems are not enough: one has also to add, step by step, higher values to the ones already achieved. Before this can happen, one needs to work through the oedipal situation, which begins with deep disappointment in the mother and involves intense competition with and jealousy of the father. The boy does not yet trust Father enough to relate openly to him. To master the difficulties of this period, the boy needs a mother’s understanding help: only because the ogre’s wife protects and hides Jack can he acquire the ogre-father’s powers.

  On his first trip Jack steals a bag filled with gold. This gives him and his mother the resources to buy what they need, but eventually they run out of money. So Jack repeats his excursion, although he now knows that in doing so he risks his life.*

  On his second trip Jack gains the hen that lays the golden eggs: he has learned that one runs out of things if one cannot produce them or have them produced. With the hen Jack could be content, since now all physical needs are permanently satisfied. So it is not necessity which motivates Jack’s last trip, but the desire for daring and adventure—the wish to find something better than mere material goods. Thus, Jack next attains the golden harp, which symbolizes beauty, art, the higher things in life. This is followed by the last growth experience, in which Jack learns that it will not do to rely on magic for solving life’s problems.

  As Jack gains full humanity by striving for and gaining what the harp represents, he is also forcefully made aware—through the ogre’s nearly catching him—that if he continues to rely on magic solutions, he will end up destroyed. As the ogre pursues him down the beanstalk, Jack calls out to his mother to get the ax and cut the beanstalk. The mother brings the ax as told, but on seeing the giant’s huge legs coming down the beanstalk, she freezes into immobility; she is unable to deal with phallic objects. On a different level, the mother’s freezing signifies that while a mother may protect her boy against the dangers involved in striving for manhood—as the ogre’s wife did in hiding Jack—she cannot gain it for him; only he himself can do that. Jack grabs the ax and cuts off the beanstalk, and with it brings down the ogre, who perishes from his fall. In doing so, Jack rids himself of the father who is experienced on the oral level: as a jealous ogre who wants to devour.

  But in cutting down the beanstalk Jack not only frees himself from a view of the father as a destructive and devouring ogre; he also thus relinquishes his belief in the magic power of the phallus as the means for gaining him all the good things in life. In putting the ax to the beanstalk, Jack forswears magic solutions; he becomes “his own man.” He no longer will take from others, but neither will he live in mortal fear of ogres, nor rely on Mother’s hiding him in an oven (regressing to orality).

  As the story of “Jack and the Beanstalk” ends, Jack is ready to give up phallic and oedipal fantasies and instead try to live in reality, as much as a boy his age can do so. The next development may see him no longer trying to trick a sleeping father out of his possessions, nor fantasizing that a mother figure will for his sake betray her husband, but ready to strive openly for his social and sexual ascendency. This is where “Jack and His Bargains” begins, which sees its hero attain such maturity.

  This fairy tale, like many others, could teach parents much as it helps children grow up. It tells mothers what little boys need to solve their oedipal problems: Mother must side with the boy’s masculine daring, surreptitious though it may
still be, and protect him against the dangers which might be inherent in masculine assertion, particularly when directed against the father.

  The mother in “Jack and the Beanstalk” fails her son because, instead of supporting his developing masculinity, she denies its validity. The parent of the other sex ought to encourage a child’s pubertal sexual development, particularly as he seeks goals and achievements in the wider world. Jack’s mother, who thought her son utterly foolish for the trading he had done, stands revealed as the foolish one because she failed to recognize the development from child to adolescent which was taking place in her son. If she had had her way, Jack would have remained an immature child, and neither he nor his mother would have escaped their misery. Jack, motivated by his budding manhood, undeterred by his mother’s low opinion of him, gains great fortune through his courageous actions. This story teaches—as do many other fairy tales, such as “The Three Languages”—that the parents’ error is basically the lack of an appropriate and sensitive response to the various problems involved in a child’s maturing personally, socially, and sexually.

  The oedipal conflict within the boy in this fairy tale is conveniently externalized onto two very distant figures who exist somewhere in a castle in the sky: the ogre and his wife. It is many a child’s experience that most of the time, when Father—like the ogre in the tale—is out of the home, the child and his mother have a good time together, as do Jack and the ogre’s wife. Then suddenly Father comes home, asking for his meal, which spoils everything for the child, who is not made welcome by his father. If a child is not given the feeling that his father is happy to find him home, he will be afraid of what he fantasized while Father was away, because it didn’t include Father. Since the child wants to rob Father of his most prized possessions, how natural that he should fear being destroyed in retaliation.

  Given all the dangers of regressing to orality, here is another implied message of the Jack story: it was not at all bad that Milky White stopped giving milk. Had this not happened, Jack would not have gotten the seeds out of which the beanstalk grew. Orality thus not only sustains—when hung on to too long, it prevents further development; it even destroys, as does the orally fixated ogre. Orality can be left safely behind for masculinity if Mother approves and continues to offer protection. The ogre’s wife hides Jack in a safe, confined place, as Mother’s womb had provided safety against all dangers. Such a short regression to a previous stage of development provides the security and strength needed for the next step in independence and self-assertion. It permits the little boy to enjoy fully the advantages of the phallic development he is now entering. And if the bag of gold and, even more, the hen that lays the golden eggs stand for anal ideas of possession, the story assures that the child will not get stuck in the anal stage of development: he will soon realize that he must sublimate such primitive views and become dissatisfied with them. He will then settle for nothing less than the golden harp and what it symbolizes.*

  *For example, in the Brothers Grimm’s tale “The Raven,” a queen’s daughter turned into a raven can be freed from her enchantment if the hero awaits her fully awake on the following afternoon. The raven warns him that to remain awake he must not eat or drink of anything an old woman will offer him. He promises, but on three consecutive days permits himself to be induced to take something and in consequence falls asleep at the appointed time when the raven-princess comes to meet him. Here it is an old woman’s jealousy and a young man’s selfish cupidity which explain his falling asleep when he should be wide awake for his beloved.

  *There are many fairy tales in which an all-too-serious princess is won by the man who can make her laugh—that is, free her emotionally. This is frequently achieved by the hero’s making persons who normally command respect look ridiculous. For example, in the Brothers Grimm’s story “The Golden Goose,” Simpleton, the youngest of three sons, because of his kindness to an old dwarf is given a goose with golden feathers. Cupidity induces various people to try to pull a feather off, but for this they get stuck to the goose, and to each other. Finally a parson and a sexton get stuck, too, and have to run after Simpleton and his goose. They look so ridiculous that on seeing this procession, the princess laughs.

  *The Brothers Grimm’s story “The Raven” may serve as a comparison to support the idea that three-times-repeated self-control over instinctual tendencies demonstrates sexual maturity, while its absence indicates an immaturity that prevents the gaining of one’s true love. Unlike Jack, the hero in “The Raven,” instead of controlling his desire for food and drink and for falling asleep, succumbs three times to the temptation by accepting the old woman’s saying “One time is no time”—that is, it doesn’t count—which shows his moral immaturity. He thus loses the princess. He finally gains her only after many errands through which he grows.

  *How different is the behavior of Jack in “Jack and His Bargains,” who trusts his newly gained strength. He does not hide or get things on the sly; on the contrary, when in a dangerous situation, whether with his father, his competitors for the princess, or the wild beasts, he openly uses the power of his stick to gain his goals.

  *On some level, climbing up the beanstalk symbolizes not only the “magic” power of the phallus to rise, but also a boy’s feelings connected with masturbation. The child who masturbates fears that if he is found out, he will suffer terrible punishment, as symbolized by the ogre’s doing away with him if he should discover what Jack is up to. But the child also feels as if he is, in masturbating, “stealing” some of his parent’s powers. The child who, on an unconscious level, understands this meaning of the story derives reassurance that his masturbation anxieties are invalid. His “phallic” excursion into the world of the grown-up giant-ogres, far from leading to his destruction, gains him advantages he is able to enjoy permanently.

  Here is another example of how the fairy tale permits the child to understand and be helped on an unconscious level without his having to become aware on a conscious level of what the story is dealing with. The fairy tale represents in images what goes on in the unconscious or preconscious of the child: how his awakening sexuality seems like a miracle that happens in the darkness of the night, or in his dream. Climbing up the beanstalk, and what it symbolizes, creates the anxiety that at the end of this experience he will be destroyed for his daring. The child fears that his desire to become sexually active amounts to stealing parental powers and prerogatives, and that therefore this can be done only on the sly, when the adults are unable to see what goes on. After the story has given body to these anxieties, it assures the child that the ending will be a good one.

  *Unfortunately, “Jack and the Beanstalk” is often reprinted in a form that contains many changes and additions, mostly the result of efforts to provide moral justification for Jack’s robbing the giant. These changes, however, destroy the story’s poetic impact and rob it of its deeper psychological meaning. In this bowdlerized version, a fairy tells Jack that the giant’s castle and the magic objects were once the possessions of Jack’s father, which the giant took after killing him; and that Jack is therefore to slay the giant and gain rightful possession of the magic objects. This makes all that happens to Jack a moral tale of retribution rather than a story of manhood achieved.

  The original “Jack and the Beanstalk” is the odyssey of a boy striving to gain independence from a mother who thinks little of him, and on his own achieving greatness. In the bowdlerized version, Jack does only what another powerful older female, the fairy, orders him to do.

  One last example of how those who think they are improving on a traditional fairy tale actually do the opposite. In both versions, when Jack seizes the magic harp, it cries out “Master, Master,” awakening the ogre, who then pursues Jack with the intention of killing him. That a talking harp arouses its rightful master when being stolen makes good fairy-tale sense. But what is the child to think of a magic harp which was not only stolen from its rightful master, but stolen by the man who vilely
killed him, and which in the process of being regained by his rightful master’s son nevertheless arouses the thief and murderer? Changing such details robs the story of its magic impact, as it deprives the magic objects—and everything else that happens in the story—of their symbolic meaning as external representations of inner processes.

  THE JEALOUS QUEEN

  IN “SNOW WHITE”

  AND THE MYTH OF OEDIPUS

  Since fairy tales deal imaginatively with the most important developmental issues in all our lives, it is not surprising that so many of them center in some way on oedipal difficulties. But so far the fairy tales discussed have focused on the problems of the child and not those of the parent. In actuality, as the relation of a child to his parent is full of problems, so is that of a parent to his child, so many fairy tales touch also on the parents’ oedipal problems. While the child is encouraged to believe that he is quite able to find his way out of his oedipal difficulties, the parent is warned against the disastrous consequences for him if he permits himself to get caught up in them.*

  In “Jack and the Beanstalk” a mother’s unreadiness to permit her son to become independent was hinted at. “Snow White” tells how a parent—the queen—gets destroyed by jealousy of her child who, in growing up, surpasses her. In the Greek tragedy of Oedipus, who is of course undone by oedipal entanglements, not only is his mother, Jocasta, also ruined, but first of all to fall is Oedipus’ father, Laius, whose fear that his son will replace him eventually leads to the tragedy that undoes them all. The queen’s fear that Snow White will excel her is the theme of the fairy tale which carries the wronged child’s name, as does the story of Oedipus. It may be useful, therefore, to consider briefly this famous myth which, through psychoanalytic writings, has become the metaphor by which we refer to a particular emotional constellation within the family—one that can cause the most severe impediments to growing up into a mature, well-integrated person, while being, on the other hand, the potential source of the richest personality development.