The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1975

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Key Figures

Bruno Bettelheim

The author, Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990) was born in Vienna, Austria, where he worked in his family’s lumber business until 1938, when the Nazis invaded Austria and placed him in a concentration camp at Dachau, Germany because he was Jewish. On being released in 1939, he moved to the United States. He embarked on his interest in psychology when he became a research associate with the Progressive Education Association at the University of Chicago. By 1944, he had become an associate professor of psychology there, as well as the head of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, where he worked with children with autism. He was interested in applying psychoanalytic principles to the troubles the children faced, and he published on the topic in books titled Love is Not Enough (1950) and Truants from Life (1954). Bettelheim became a public intellectual, even appearing on the Dick Cavett show in 1979; however, there was a shadow side to his personality. Other scholars, including Jack Zipes, claimed that Bettelheim fabricated his credentials and that much of his work, including that for The Uses of Enchantment (1976), was plagiarized. There were also rumors that he physically abused some of the children under his care at the Sonia Shankman school. He lived with depression, and, following the death of his wife in 1984 and a stroke in 1987, he died by suicide.

Bettelheim wrote The Uses of Enchantment during his retirement. It has few autobiographical details, although it is peppered with case studies of the children he encountered during his work. He illustrates how fairy tale motifs have helped children figure out their problems; for example, how a girl who was jealous of her sister “was very fond of ‘Cinderella,’ since the story offered her material with which to act out her feelings, and because without the story’s imagery she would have been hard pressed to comprehend and express them” (241). Such instances indicate that Bettelheim’s findings derive from close observation of small children and their interaction with fairy tales over time.

Bettelheim’s focus on European fairy tales and his preference for the Grimm Brothers is a symptom of his Germanic background. Bettelheim says that he, like the famous German poet Goethe, was told these tales by his mother, and the local variants of the stories they espoused were likely to be modifications of the Grimm Brothers’ tales. Thus, his preference of the Grimm Brothers’ work does not have a meritocratic basis but is the result of his heritage and early experience. As Bettelheim was exiled from his country, time and distance may have made him see it as the land of fairy tales. From an experiential point of view, the extreme violence the Nazis perpetrated on Jews like him was akin to fairy tale heroes’ mistreatment at the hands of stepmothers and ogres. Moving to America would have offered a safe distance from the old country; whilst at the same time, he understood that the difficulties faced in Europe were also present in life in the States.

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) came from an Austrian Jewish background and is known as the father of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a therapeutic system derived from the notion that human thought and behavior are the result of unconscious phenomena as well as conscious ones. Thus, the patient may be suffering from things that are beyond their conscious control, including repressed memories and preoccupations. Freud’s work became highly influential during the 20th century, and psychoanalysts in both Europe and America modeled their practices on his teachings. Bettelheim was one of these disciples, and he regularly cites Freud in The Uses of Enchantment.

Freud himself was no stranger to using literature and myth to illustrate psychoanalytic motifs. In “The Theme of the Three Caskets” (1913) he references folk tales where protagonists must choose between three competing elements. However, the most famous use of myth in Freud’s oeuvre is that of Oedipus who kills his father and marries his mother (however, unlike Freud’s narrative for the Oedipus complex, the ancient Greek Oedipus does these things unwittingly). Bettelheim makes ample use of Freud’s ideas as he examines portrayals of the Oedipus complex in fairy tales and how this, in turn, influences child readers. Bettelheim also draws upon Freud’s division of the personality into the component parts of id, superego and ego, showing how fairy tales, unlike the contemporary children’s literature, give free rein to an id that matches children’s most violent fantasies.

Carl Jung

Carl Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist whose work was, in many ways, a response to Freud’s psychoanalysis. He coined the idea of the two most popular personality types—introvert and extrovert—and studied myths and folktales extensively to develop theories of archetypes and the collective unconscious. Whereas Freud focused on an individual’s inner repressed experiences, Jung was interested in the unconscious motifs of humanity as a whole.

Bettelheim is less overtly influenced by Jung than by Freud; however, his discussion of fairy tale motifs as universally applicable has much in common with Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious. He cites how Jungian psychologists view fairy tales and myths as being full of symbols that “suggest the need for gaining a higher state of selfhood—an inner renewal which is achieved as personal and racial unconscious forces become available to the person” (36).

The Brothers Grimm

Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Carl Grimm (1786-1859), known as the Brothers Grimm, were German folklorists. The fairy tales for which they became famous were published in the Kinder und Hausmärchen (1812-22). They claimed that their fairy tales came from oral sources, though a few were found in old manuscripts as part of their research.

Austrian Bettelheim, who heard fairy tales from his mother, vastly prefers the Grimm brothers’ tales to those of other fabulists, such as Charles Perrault. He sees the Grimm Brothers as less aristocratic and more authentic and thus more helpful to children. For example, while Perrault makes Little Red Riding Hood’s seduction by the wolf explicit, the Grimm Brothers leave it implicit, thus providing scope for the child to meet the tale at their stage in development and divine a personalized significance from it. Bettelheim admits that many of the Grimm Brothers’ stories begin with Christian motifs; however, he overlooks this aspect to make their work more relevant to a secular age.

Charles Perrault

Charles Perrault (1628-1703) was a French courtier best known for his Tales of Mother Goose (1697). These included some of the most famous fairy tales such as “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty.” At the end of each tale, Perrault adds a moralistic verse, intended to instruct a child reader about the meaning of the tale.

Bettelheim often refers to Perrault’s older versions of the stories before moving to a deeper analysis of the Grimm Brothers’ adaptations. Bettelheim refers to Perrault as “the academician” and implies that he was sometimes impeded from getting to the bloody heart of the fairy tale by his courtly environment (228). For example, when Perrault dampens down Basile’s Italian version of the Sleeping Beauty, in which “a married king ravishes a sleeping maiden” and “gets her with child” (229), Bettelheim considers that “this is not that Perrault was lacking in artistry, but that he did not take his fairy stories seriously and was most intent on the cute or moralistic verse ending he appended to each” (230).

Bettelheim also criticizes Perrault for destroying fairy tales’ “feeling of timelessness” and universality by adding details that were specific to Perrault’s time (230); for example, in the detail that the awakening Sleeping Beauty’s costume was old-fashioned, in the style of “my great-grandmother, and had a point peeping over a high collar” (230). Bettelheim believes that such specificity makes the tale less useful; it impedes the child’s ability to imagine what Sleeping Beauty looks like for themselves, and this hinders their identification with the heroine.