Bettelheim – Lion's Whiskers

About Stories

admin — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

“[The] prevalent parental belief is that a child must be diverted from what troubles him most, his formless, nameless anxieties, and his chaotic, angry, and even violent fantasies. Many parents believe that only conscious reality or pleasant and wish-fulfilling images should be presented to the child – that he should be exposed only to the sunny side of things. But such one-sided fare nourishes the mind only in a one-sided way, and real life is not all sunny.”

~ Bruno Bettelheim

Deeper into the Enchanted Woods We Go

admin — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Vintage)Here are two more passages from the introduction which bear some consideration.

“It is characteristic of fairy tales to state an existential dilemma briefly and pointedly. This permits the child to come to grips with the problem in its most essential form, where a more complex plot would confuse matters for him. The fairy tale simplifies all situations. Its figures are clearly drawn, and details, unless very important, are eliminated. All characters are typical rather than unique.”

This is a very important distinction between fairy tales and fiction for children. In fiction for children, characters are described with many nuanced details of biography and personality, giving them three-dimensional life. We feel that we know a friendly and cheerful little boy like Wilbur, the pig in Charlotte’s Web. Many of us have met a prickly and defensive kid on the wrong side of the child welfare groups, a Gilly from Katherine Paterson’s The Great Gilly Hopkins. We know precociously wise girls like studious Hermione Granger, and good-natured, loyal goof-buddies like Ron Weasley, Harry Potter’s sidekicks. One of the reasons kids are attracted to these books is because they are attracted to the characters, who are particular people (even if sometimes they are animals) and as such could be people they might meet or come to know.

On the other hand, fairy tales offer not characters but situations, the existential dilemmas of the above Bettelheim excerpt. We don’t want real-seeming characters in them, because we want to inhabit them ourselves, for a while. The “characters” in fairy tales are more like masks that we can try on to see how it feels. We don’t really know much of anything about Cinderella’s personality, but we can try on what it feels like to be rejected and excluded and abused, and then rewarded.

“Today [1975!] children no longer grow up with the security of an extended family, or of a well-integrated community. Therefore, even more than at the time fairy tales were invented, it is important to provide the modern child with images of heroes who have to go out into the world all by themselves and who, although originally ignorant of the ultimate things, find secure places in the world by following their right way with deep inner confidence.”

After all, isn’t this what we mean when we talk about courage? Deep inner confidence is certainly what I wish for my child, when she sets off in the world to seek her fortune. She has already had to walk through a pretty dark forest to get this far, and will have more dangerous terrain ahead. I hope that all the many stories we’ve shared will help light her way. Is she, and are the rest of today’s children, more in need of fairy tales than 1975’s children? I don’t know; I just know that all children need them, just as they need good novels with individualized characters, and family stories, and heroes from history. We may be living in the 21^st Century, but I believe we need to bring the fairy tales with us into the future. Einstein agreed, and who am I to argue with him?

Into the Enchanted Woods!

admin — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Today I’d like to offer a couple of passages from the introduction to Bruno Bettelheim’s landmark book, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales , originally published in 1975. This has been a supremely influential book over the years, although from here, in 2011, the heavy Freudian perspective feels somewhat dated. Nevertheless, there is much to be gleaned from these pages, even if you must take some of the analysis of individual tales with a grain or two of salt. Again, these passages are from the introduction, and so speak about fairy tales in general. For Einstein’s advice about fairy tales, be sure to read “Relativity.”

“This is exactly the message that fairy tales get across to the child in manifold form: that a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence – but if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious.”

“The more I tried to understand why these stories are so successful at enriching the inner life of the child, the more I realized that these tales in a much deeper sense than any other reading material, start where the child really is in his psychological and emotional being. They speak about his severe inner pressures in a way that the child unconsciously understands, and – without belittling the most serious inner struggles which growing up entails – offer examples of both temporary and permanent solutions to pressing difficulties.”

Both of these passages speak, if indirectly, to the question of courage. Do these words not evoke the challenges for which children need courage: unexpected, unjust hardship, pressing difficulties? For children, everything is new. They don’t have decades of experience to compare their encounters with – many things are unexpected, many things affront their developing ideas of what is just. Many things are pressing difficulties for a child.

Bettelheim himself, an Austrian Jew, had some experience of unexpected and unjust hardship in the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. As an eminent child psychologist after World War II, he observed the sort of attention that children paid to fairy tales; in particular, he noted that children often ask for the same story again and again with real urgency while they are struggling with new concepts. He proposed that the stories help children understand the mystifying experience of life in symbolic terms.

Some experiences are too big to grapple with directly, and can only be approached by using stand-ins. Metaphors, in my opinion, are a great achievement of humanity and a really great tool for parents. Children need not go unarmed and unarmored into the world, not if they have stories as both sword and shield, and as flag of truce.