Word: bettelheim
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...Uses of Enchantment, Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim addresses those problems by examining the implications of fairy tales. Weary of bedtime books that ignore or sugar-coat the real world, Bettelheim ransacks the stories for Freudian subtexts. In his view the Oedipal drama plays itself out in the giants that Jack slays and in the demands of scheming stepmothers. "While it entertains the child," he concludes, "the fairy tale enlightens him about himself, and fosters his personality development." The psychologist does not neglect aesthetics: "Fairy tales are unique not only as a form of literature, but as works of art which...
...Uses of Enchantment Dr. Bettelheim finds that these adventures are not mere bedtime stories. They are life divined from the inside. Once decoded they can be apprehended as allegories of unconscious terror and yearning. "To the child," Bettelheim writes in this provocative and quirky book, "and to the adult who, like Socrates, knows that there is still a child in the wisest of us, fairy tales reveal truths about mankind and himself...
...foot, not the door. Through the narratives a child understands that the supernatural belongs, in the words of the Grimms' Frog Prince, "in the old days, when wishing still helped." When actuality intrudes too abruptly upon the child's world, the price may be prohibitive. Argues Bettelheim: "Many young people, who today suddenly seek escape in drug-induced dreams, who apprentice themselves to some guru ... or who in some other fashion escape from reality into daydreams... were prematurely pressed to view reality in an adult...
This defense of the fairy tale provides the hard, glistening surface of Bettelheim's book; the very title The Uses of Enchantment suggests utility over literary delight, therapy before amusement. Deep within the volume are less convincing "proofs" of this attitude. The legends of Snow White, of Hansel and Gretel, of Goldilocks are parsed for every psychological nuance. Here the reader leaves the nursery for what Vladimir Nabokov calls "the fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little embryos spying...
...George to kill the dragon." For Poet W.H. Auden, a reading of the Grimm Brothers could serve to "restore to parents the right and the duty to educate their children." Between these two terminals there are millions of valid interpretations - as many as there are readers and critics. Pace Bettelheim, enchantment has more uses today than did once upon a time...