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

As a Freudian psychoanalyst, Bettelheim viewed that the human personality was made up of three components: the unconscious, animalistic id, driven by appetites for food, sex, and violence; the ego, the conscious part of ourselves that makes rational decisions and is the version we present to the world; and the superego, the moral conscience that influences the ego and is made up of parental and societal values. While all three components are present in all humans, mature adults are better capable of bringing the id under the control of the ego and superego and even channeling it as their life force. In contrast, young children, who have not resolved their oedipal conflicts, can often find themselves overwhelmed by the id.

For Bettelheim, fairy tales help children to see and integrate the different parts of their personality because these stories give free rein to the id. The id in fairy tales can arrive in the form of a murderous stepmother, a man-eating giant, or a lustful Bluebeard figure who rapes and murders girls. Such extreme manifestations of the id may intimidate parents, but these figures recognize and give symbolic form to a child’s most basic impulses. By allowing children to identify with the hero and gain ego-strength through them, the fairy tale encourages children to defeat their base impulses and move on to the next stage in development.

However, when it comes to the Animal Groom cycle of fairy tales, Bettelheim emphasizes the importance of befriending and valuing “animal nature”; in order to achieve happy marriage, says Bettelheim, heroines must address the repression that causes them to view sexuality as bestial (78). By thus valuing the animal nature of their grooms, the fairy tale heroines socialize the id and can contemplate the former taboo of sexuality as a natural part of life.

The Oedipus complex refers to the Freudian psychoanalytic concept that children aged three to five are attracted to their opposite-sex parent and see the same-sex parent as competition. The complex refers to the original Greek myth where Oedipus kills his father and marries his mother. In young children, it manifests in fantasies of wanting to get the same-sex parent out of the way so that they can enjoy all of the opposite-sex parent’s attention. This then becomes fraught with the anxiety that the same-sex parent will find out, seek to destroy them, and succeed because they are much stronger.

Bettelheim argues that fairy tales offer models for recognizing and renegotiating the Oedipus complex; for example, he conjectures that the evil stepmother in “Snow White,” who seeks to kill Snow White repeatedly, functions as a daughter’s projection that because she is jealous of the attention her mother receives from her father, her mother must be jealous of her. In such a reversal, “the feeling of inferiority is defensively turned into a feeling of superiority” (204). While the tale illustrates Snow White’s oedipal anxieties, it shows how, through a process of maturation, her immature and potentially incestuous love for her father is transferred onto her rescuing prince. Thus, says Bettelheim, fairy tales offer the consolation that although one will lose out to the same-sex parent in the oedipal battle, they will be rewarded with a partner who will make them the center of their attention.

Invoking a Freudian concept of childhood development, Bettelheim reminds parents that the passage from infancy to adulthood is neither smooth nor automatic. Instead, a child passes through successive stages of development, each of which must give way to a more mature stage. Fairy tales illustrate these transitions in symbolic form.

The oral stage in development characterizes a child’s experience from birth to about 18 months. During this time, the mouth is the chief pleasure organ, and the child is obsessed with filling it with food and other objects. As this stage of development coincides with breastfeeding, the mother is an all-providing nurturer and the child her receptacle. While no fairy tale protagonists are babies, some child heroes show evidence of inhabiting or regressing to an oral stage. For example, Jack in “Jack and the Beanstalk” experiences something that is akin to the end of the oral stage when his “good cow Milky White, who provided all that was needed, suddenly stops giving milk” (188). This “arouses dim memories” in the child “of that tragic time when the flow of milk ceased […] when he was weaned” and “the mother demands that the child must learn to make do with what the outside world can offer” (188). For Jack, as for Hansel and Gretel, the end of the oral stage is symbolized by their parents’ sending them out to make their own way. The fairy tales teach that a return to a previous stage is not possible and that the only way is forward. While modern children may be lucky enough not to be thrown out by their parents, they will unconsciously recognize fairy tale motifs that symbolize an end to the oral stage.

Still, the fairy tales also teach that the experience and memory of the all-giving mother of the oral stage is essential for child’s belief in their ability to acquire satisfaction and happiness. According to Bettelheim, a key motivation in going out in the world is re-encountering “the all-giving mother of our infancy” in another form, as “preconsciously or unconsciously, it is this hope of finding her somewhere which gives us the strength to leave home” (94). The separation of the all-giving good mother from the demanding stepmother figure who replaces her allows the child to hold onto their good object and find confidence in their future.

In Freud’s model of psychosocial development, the anal stage occurs between the ages of one and three. It coincides with potty training and results in the child’s fascination with its own processes of elimination. The anal stage is important for a child’s later ability to be clean and orderly. Bettelheim does not explore this stage in development in his study of fairy tales, only once mentioning that Jack’s hoarding of the bag of gold and golden eggs “stand for anal ideas of possession” (193). Jack’s eventual preference of the golden harp, an instrument that he can show off as it facilitates his entry into the social world, indicates that he will now progress to the phallic stage.