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

Life Divined from the Inside

Bettelheim argues that in fairy tales, “internal processes are externalized and comprehensible” (25). He recalls a tradition in Hindu medicine where a patient is given a fairy tale to meditate on when faced with a problem. While his external problems will be different from the fairy tale protagonist’s, his internal conflict will be similar. Importantly, the fairy tale does not dictate the solution; rather, the meditator uses the tale as a guide to find his own solution and so is active in the model of his own healing.

Bettelheim continues to emphasize the role of fairy tales in “achieving a more mature consciousness to civilize the chaotic pressures of their unconscious” (24). These stories have evolved over generations to address universal concerns and provide the reassuring message that a good life is possible as long as we do not evade the struggles that push our current, limited identity toward a more mature and satisfying one. Bettelheim emphasizes that reading the story aloud to a child is the most helpful method of disseminating it as the parent thus affirms the child’s process of using fairy tales as a guide to overcoming obstacles.

“The Fisherman and the Jinny”: Fairy Tale Compared to Fable

“The Fisherman and the Jinny” is a tale from The Arabian Nights. In the story, a poor fisherman casts his net into the sea four times. The first three catches are futile, but the last brings a copper jar containing a giant Jinny (genie). The Jinny threatens to kill the fisherman, who saves himself by outwitting the Jinny: He teases the Jinny that he does not believe that a creature of such enormous size could fit into a container as small as the copper jar. When the Jinny re-enters the jar to challenge the fisherman’s taunt, the fisherman quickly caps it and tosses it back into the ocean.

For Bettelheim, the Jinny’s wrath compares to that of a young child when they feel deserted by their parents or caretakers. While a child first thinks of a happy reunion with their absent parent, after a time, the child will begin fantasizing about the revenge they will wreak on their abandoner. The trapped Jinny represents the “bottled-up feelings” of an abandoned child (30). Bettelheim emphasizes that “on his own, the child does not know what has happened to him—all he knows is that he has to act this way” (30). The idea that the child may be overpowered by their emotions is too intimidating a thought to harbor. With the introduction of the fairy tale, the child can unconsciously identify with the Jinny and process their frustration.

Another important feature of this tale is that the fisherman’s net brings back nothing worthwhile until the fourth attempt. This provides the message that one must not give up even in the face of a few failures. In psychoanalysis, this relates to the triumph of the reality principle over the pleasure principle: While the drive for pleasure strives for immediate satisfaction and minimum discomfort, the reality principle engenders the ability to tolerate frustration with the hope of gaining an enduring reward.

Bettelheim shows that while myth and fable present the choice between pleasure and reality as didactic and allegorical, the fairy tale works more by implication and entices the young reader towards the more rewarding outcome rather than dictating to them.

Fairy Tale Versus Myth: Optimism Versus Pessimism

Bettelheim believes that fairy tales are more useful than myths in childhood development. Both these narrative types became part of the collective consciousness after being developed over centuries. Psychoanalysts agree that their symbols represent the content of our unconscious minds and convey messages for how to attain a higher state of selfhood. However, the difference between them is that while myth posits exemplary settings and specimens of humanity alongside awe-inspiring feats of heroism, the fairy tale presents the supernatural as “ordinary, something that could happen to you or me […] when out on a walk in the woods” (37). The heroes and heroines are often little-described everyday folk with whom children can easily identify. The stories’ diction emphasizes this by being casual as opposed to grandiose.

Bettelheim says myths can intimidate young children because they “project an ideal personality acting on the basis of superego demands” (41), thus giving the impression that no mere mortal could live up to such heroism and would be defeated. In contrast, fairy tales “depict an ego integration which allows for appropriate satisfaction of id desires” (41), as the child feels they can emulate the protagonists’ actions in order to mature and find happiness.

He also argues that the tragic endings of myths are discouraging for youngsters, while fairy tales are optimistic because they generally provide the reassurance of a happy ending. Thus, the child is willing to empathetically undergo trials with the hero, safe in the knowledge that everything will be okay in the end.

“The Three Little Pigs”: Pleasure Principle Versus Reality Principle

For Bettelheim, the fairy tale of the three little pigs is the best illustration of the pleasure principle’s evolution into the reality principle. The three houses built by the pigs—made successively from straw, wood, and brick—represent humanity’s progress throughout history, while the pigs’ actions show “progress from the id-dominated personality to the superego-influenced but essentially ego-controlled personality” (42). The third pig, who builds his house from bricks, is the only one who has learned to subjugate his desire for play in order to work towards building a secure future in line with the reality principle. Thus, his efforts are the only match for the huffing and puffing wolf, who is an externalization of everything asocial and dangerous within people and society.

“The Three Little Pigs,” says Bettelheim, is more useful than Aesop’s fable of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” which has a similar moral about the need to be industrious and sacrifice pleasure to prepare for the future. In this fable, the hard-working ant punishes the grasshopper—who sang instead of working during the summer—by refusing to share his food store come winter. Such a fable forces the child to identify with the priggish, mean-spirited ant, whereas the three little pigs represent different stages within psychic development. It is not too traumatic for the child that the first two pigs get eaten by the wolf as “the child understands subconsciously that we have to shed earlier forms of existence if we wish to move on to higher ones” (44).

The Child’s Need for Magic

Bettelheim stipulates that regardless of our age, “only a story conforming to the principles underlying our thought processes carries conviction for us” (45). Thus, with a child who is animalistic in their thinking and sees the entire world as made up of animate components, they will be better helped to contemplate life’s eternal questions—such as identity or the purpose of life—by fairy tales; fairy tales imitate the child’s “underlying thought process” (45) because they are populated with animate being, such as talking animals and dolls, rather than rational explanations. While many parents may dismiss the fantastical and try to rush their children’s integration into the rational world, this may backfire because children lack the abstract thought required for such rationality. In their hurry to provide scientific explanations, such parents ignore scientific findings about how a child’s mind works. Instead, a child will be better prepared for the rational world and the truth about their miniscule place in the cosmos if they are made to feel secure. The child derives “security only from the conviction that he understands now what baffled him before—never from being given facts which create new uncertainties” (48). Bettelheim even says that teens who experiment with drugs or seek salvation at the hands of some guru were often given an insufficient exposure to magic in their childhoods. Having missed out on this significant formative experience, they now seek other means to find “magical” security.

While some parents introduce biblical or religious stories instead of fairy tales, children struggle with this material as they do not see the dark side of their nature reflected in the examples of sainthood. Similarly, says Bettelheim, in their extreme moralistic view, these biblical stories do not allow a child to feel and progress through their negative emotions. As a result, these biblical stories are not as useful as fairy tales.

Vicarious Satisfaction Versus Conscious Recognition

Fairy tales are uniquely equipped to enable a child “to bring some order into the inner chaos of his mind so that he can understand himself better—a necessary preliminary for achieving some congruence between his perceptions and the external world” (53).

Prior to school age, a child’s great struggle is to prevent their desires from taking over and overwhelming their whole personality. The child is ruled by the appetites of the id—unconscious drives that they feel that they can little control. As the child grows, the id, ego, and superego become more distinct, and the child will be able to interact with the unconscious without it overpowering the conscious mind and without feeling that they have lost mastery over themselves. Fairy tales, even more than self-invented fantasies, can help this development, as they model how to externalize difficult feelings. After reading, the child can practice the lessons of the fairy tale through play. Bettelheim strongly advocates that the child should be allowed to experiment freely and unselfconsciously without the parent explaining the psychological workings that are going on as the child experiences the tale. To do so would take away the enjoyment and overwhelm the child who may be unable to bear hearing exactly what id-related desires they are channeling as they experience the tale.

As the fairy tale does not directly relate to the child and their immediate experiences, but someone like them, they feel more comfortable discussing its issues. Repeated readings are key, as it can take time for the full effects of the tale to absorb. This can only happen when the child is able to linger over a tale’s meaning or relate to a protagonist who seems unlike them. Thus, “for the fairy tale to have beneficial externalization effects, the child must remain unaware of the unconscious pressures he is responding to by making fairy-story solutions of his own” (58). For this reason, too, Bettelheim recommends unillustrated versions of fairy tales as illustrations supplement the artist’s vision and make the story less personal and therefore less powerful.

The Importance of Externalization: Fantasy Figures and Events

Fantasy is an essential component of filling in the gaps in a child’s understanding, but unless they find a way of ordering such fantasies, a child may become weakened or confused by them. Fairy tales can give clarity to such fantasies by bringing up a child’s conflict in an alternative form and offering the opportunity to externalize inner experience. Figures such as witches can embody unmanageable traits such as destructive wishes, as the child begins the process of sorting out his contradictions.

The vagueness at the beginning of fairy tales that take place in distant times and lands “suggest[s] a voyage into the interior of our mind, into the realms of unawareness and the unconscious” (63). The fairy tale accompanies the child into this terrain, but does not get lost there, as its structure ensures that the hero progresses through the land of magic back to reality.

By sharing fairy tales with their children, parents pass on the message that they consider their children’s “inner experiences as embodied in fairy tales worthwhile, legitimate, and in some fashion even ‘real’” (64). Parents’ validation of their children’s feelings gives the children the sense that they are important to their parents. In contrast, if children are only told stories that are true to life, which ignore their fantasy-filled inner lives, they may believe that their feelings and, by extension, they themselves, are unimportant to their parents.

Transformations: The Fantasy of the Wicked Stepmother

Fairy tales play an essential role in helping the child bridge the gap between their internal experiences and the real world. Bettelheim asserts that this is evident in the fantasy of the wicked stepmother, an envious, pleasure-denying imposter figure found in many fairy tales who takes the place of the child’s adoring original mother. In real life, when the child’s mother denies their needs or wishes, the child creates two figures in their head, as the mother changes from “all-giving protector” to “cruel stepmother” (67). This splitting of the mother into two personae allows the child to keep the image of the good, generous mother “uncontaminated,” which is essential to their sense of security (67). The stepmother figure also becomes a scapegoat for the child’s anger, which does not need to tarnish the real, good mother. Bettelheim claims that such splitting also takes place in many young children’s fantasy where they are adopted and end up cohabiting with their denying, demanding stepparents by mistake, while their noble, good parents are elsewhere.

Further, says Bettelheim, the child also splits themselves into good and bad figures. Bettelheim recalls that nighttime bedwetters often create an alias for the person who wet their bed, thus disidentifying with this transgressive part of themselves. Because it is too frightening for the child to view that their conscious self is responsible for this accident, it feels safer to place the blame onto someone else altogether. Bettelheim views that insisting to the child that they take ownership of the bedwetting will cause shame and delay the integration of their personality. Instead, parents should allow the bedwetting phase to pass and for the child to achieve a self that they can be proud of. Then, with time, the child will be able to accept that they can be flawed without being a bad person.

Bringing Order into Chaos

Bettelheim says that before and during the oedipal period, when the child is between three and six, their internal world is chaotic and confused. The child is often overwhelmed by extreme emotions that hit upon the opposites of love and hate, good and bad, because they “cannot comprehend intermediate stages of degree and intensity” (74). Fairy tales offer a parallel world for this inner experience, owing to the polarities of its figures, who are entirely good and helpful or destructive and devouring. The child can use the fairy tale to create a system that “suggests not only isolating and separating the disparate and confusing aspects of the child’s experience into opposites, but projecting these onto different figures” (75).

These extremes of good and bad are not unlike the distinct aspects of the personality conceived of by Freud: the superego, ego and id. Like the figures in the fairy tale, these separations are also fictions and only useful for sorting out our tangled thoughts. In fairy tales, the id is often symbolized in animals. Like the wolf in “The Little Red Riding Hood,” it is an entirely destructive force. However, when shaped by the ego and superego, the animalistic id represents our physical energy and is part of an integrated personality.

“The Queen Bee”: Achieving Integration

Bettelheim considers the Grimm brothers’ little-known story “The Queen Bee” to be the best illustration of the id’s integration with the superego and ego. It relates the story of a king’s three sons. The oldest two boys are given up to a wanton existence dominated by the id. The youngest son, Simpleton, goes out to join them. Guided by the nobler values of the superego and ego, Simpleton insists that the older brothers should not disturb the ants, ducks, or bees they encounter on the road. They arrive at the castle of another king where everything has been turned to stone. A little gray man submits the oldest brother to the challenge of gathering a thousand pearls that are hidden in the moss of the forest. When he fails, he is punished by being turned to stone. The same fate meets the second brother.

Simpleton is also daunted by this task, however, the ants he has saved from his brother’s malice come to his rescue. When it comes to performing two subsequently challenging tasks, the ducks and queen bee he has saved help him. He is rewarded with marriage to the castle’s youngest and most loveable princess and inheriting the kingdom.

For Bettelheim, the two eldest brothers “who were unresponsive to the requirements of personality integration failed to meet the tasks of reality” (77). Their petrification symbolizes their being asleep to everything except the appetites of the id. Simpleton, who is influenced by the ego and superego, is also incapable of meeting the grounds of reality in the story. However, when his animal nature, symbolic of the id, “has been befriended, recognized as important, and brought into accord with ego and superego” (78), he achieves the total personality to complete the tasks. His self-mastery is symbolized by the reward of kingship.

“Brother and Sister”: Unifying Our Dual Nature

Bettelheim argues that prior to achieving personality integration, our superego and id “war against each other” (78). The child is aware of such a duality when he wants to obey his mother’s order to not eat a cookie while also wanting to eat the cookie. Fairy tales can aid the understanding of such inner conflict.

The Brothers Grimm tale “Brother and Sister” puts these two rival instincts into two separate personae. When a brother and sister leave home in search of a better life, the sister is better able to control her desire to drink as she listens to the murmuring of water telling her she will be turned into a different animal each time if she does. While she twice restrains her more id-driven brother, the third time he succumbs to his thirst and is turned into a fawn. The sister places her golden garter around his neck—a gesture that, for Bettelheim, symbolizes forgoing a purely animal nature for a higher state of humanity.

The sister and fawn make a life in the forest. However, one day, the fawn demands to be let out so it can enjoy the excitement of the king’s hunt, despite the risk to its life. The king notices the golden garter around the fawn’s neck and asks that it should be captured but not killed. When the fawn is found at the hut, alongside the girl, the king finds the girl beautiful and asks her to marry him. They live happily alongside the fawn.

However, when the girl, now a queen, gives birth to a son, a witch poses as a lady in waiting and suffocates the queen, placing her own daughter in the queen’s bed. The queen, however, returns nightly (and presumably in some spiritual form) to tend to her child and her brother fawn. A nursemaid witnesses this and tells the king, who calls the queen his “beloved wife” and so brings her back to life (82). Later, when the witch is found and brought to justice, the fawn regains his human form. For Bettelheim, the story shows the triumph of human qualities over animalistic ones, as the integration of the superego and id can only happen when injustice, in the form of the witch, has been done away with. He adds that the transitions of moving away from the parental home and childbirth are significant for the brother’s animal transformation and the sister’s death, because they represent crisis points where one way of living must be exchanged for another. In the end, the sister’s superego-driven concern for others redeems both her and her more id-driven brother.

“Sinbad the Seaman and Sinbad the Porter”: Fancy Versus Reality

This tale from The Arabian Nights features a poor porter called Sinbad listening to the intrepid escapades of a rich voyager. Symbolically, we are made to understand that the porter and traveler are “the same person in different forms” as the voyager addresses the porter as his brother and the porter wonders what it would be like to be the voyager (84). For Bettelheim, the porter’s longing for the voyager’s life occurs when “the ego, exhausted by its tasks, then permits itself to be overwhelmed by the id” (85). The voyager’s life of pleasure is more in line with the id. However, this only happens at the level of thought, as the porter returns to a state of ego-dominance and his duty-filled life.

Bettelheim admires the story for making both the voyager and the porter attractive characters and so giving the message that all sides of our personality are equally valid. Still, he wishes that there were a happy ending to the story, with the two living together in a manner that symbolizes psychic integration.

The Frame Story of Thousand and One Nights

In the frame story (overarching narrative that contains multiple shorter stories) of the Thousand and One Nights, King Shahryar discovers his wife has betrayed him with one of his slaves and, losing all trust in humanity, he becomes dominated by his id. The disappointments he has endured means that his ego can no longer restrain his id; he therefore forcibly sleeps with a different “nubile virgin” every night before killing her in the morning and moving onto the next. The vizier’s daughter Scheherazade wishes to be the king’s “means of deliverance” by telling the king a different fairy tale every night (87). On each occasion, he spares her life by giving her the chance to live another day and tell a different tale. In Bettelheim’s view, the multiplicity of Scheherazade’s tales represents how no single story can ever provide a solution to all our problems.

The author regards Scheherazade as having “a superego-dominated ego which has become so cut off from selfish id that it is ready to risk the person’s very existence to obey a moral obligation” (88). However, the king is only redeemed when Scheherazade begins to love him, drawing upon the id’s positive energies for her constructive purposes. They thus achieve integration, the only state that prevents humanity from being riven in two by contradictory impulses.

Tales of Two Brothers

Tales that feature two brothers of opposing personalities are at least as old as the example found on an Egyptian papyrus of 1250 BC. Bettelheim counts at least 770 different versions of a tale where one brother seeks an adventurous life dominated by the id, while another is more cautious and wishes to stay at home. For Bettelheim, these opposing figures represent a dichotomy inherent within each of us: “the striving for independence and self-assertion, and the opposite tendency to remain safely at home, tied to the parents” (91). The latter brother may be laboring under an oedipal attachment, whereby if he fails to differentiate himself from his parents, he will be destroyed. The stories assert that we cannot thrive without an integration of both tendencies, as the two brothers set off on a journey of discovery and self-realization.

Interestingly, Bettelheim asserts that a key motivator for going on the journey is the hope that we will re-encounter “the all-giving mother of our infancy” in another form, even as we trick ourselves into believing we seek an autonomous existence (94).

“The Three Languages”: Building Integration

This Brothers’ Grimm story tells the tale of an adolescent who fails his father’s demands to learn from three esteemed masters and is cast out. While his father demands that his servants kill the boy, the servants take pity on him and leave him out in the woods. Bettelheim argues that after ignoring the father’s demands and surviving anyway, the boy worries that the father will seek to retaliate by destroying him.

He sets out on his own path, stubbornly insisting on learning “what he thinks is of real value” (100). He learns the language of birds, dogs, and frogs, with the frogs prophesying a future that he will become Pope. He achieves this, owing to the integration of his personality.

“The Three Feathers”: The Youngest Child as Simpleton

The number three appears often in fairy tales. In psychoanalysis, the number can stand for the ego, superego, and id. However, in the Brothers Grimm’s tale The Three Feathers, it pertains to how the youngest and “simplest” brother, who is still aligned with the instinctive nature of his unconscious, triumphs over the other two.

Fairy tales that show the triumph of youngest children are immensely comforting to small children who can feel inferior and insignificant compared to the larger parents and siblings who seem to know so much more. These stories offer the message that the child is fine as they are and that they can develop into someone capable of a happy ending.

The number three is especially pertinent for young children because “in the child’s mind, ‘two’ stands usually for the two parents, and ‘three’ for the child himself in relation to his parents, but not to his siblings” (106). However, as it is too intimidating to think about wanting to overcome one’s parents, the fairy tale transfigures the parental duo into older siblings, with whom the child is in conscious rivalry. In “The Three Feathers,” a father challenges his three sons to follow the direction of the feathers he blows into the air to find him the finest carpet. The two eldest sons, who consider themselves clever, follow their feathers to far-flung destinations east and west, but the youngest brother’s feather falls to the earth. While this originally seems inauspicious, it leads to a trapdoor and an underground realm of discovery. To Bettelheim, this trapdoor represents the unconscious, the instinctual part of our personality that gives us the bulk of our strength. The two elder brothers are undifferentiated from each other and un-special, because they function on “the basis of a much-depleted ego […] cut off from the potential of its strength and riches, the id” (108). This prevents them from growing, unlike the youngest brother, who is guided by instinct to make wise choices and excel. This provides hope to young children, who are less sophisticated but often more instinctual than their learned parents.

Oedipal Conflicts and Resolutions: The Knight in Shining Armor and the Damsel in Distress

Drawing on the emphatically heteronormative Freudian concept of the Oedipus complex (as he does consistently throughout the text), Bettelheim maintains that a little boy in the throes of oedipal conflict wants his mother to cherish him above all others and seeks to get his father out of the way. However, the boy worries about what his much more powerful father would do to him if he found out. The fairy tale, says Bettelheim, provides a solution to this problem by pretending that it is not a father-figure but rather an evil dragon who prevents one from having one’s mother for oneself: This story “gives veracity to the boy’s feeling that the most desirable female is kept in captivity by an evil figure, while implying that it is not Mother the child wants for himself, but a marvelous and wonderful woman he hasn’t met yet, but certainly will” (111).

Bettelheim then describes theoretical oedipal little girl, who resents her mother’s hold over her father but at the same time needs her mother’s care to survive; in this case, says the author, stories about an evil stepmother who keeps her captive and away from her prince fulfill the function of seeing herself as desirable enough for a prince-like figure and also as a person that a denying mother would be jealous of and threatened by. There is also a pre-oedipal good mother, who would have granted the girl’s every wish and never prevented her union with the prince (the stand-in for father). For the girl, “belief and trust in the goodness of the pre-oedipal mother, and deep loyalty to her, tend to reduce the guilt about what the girl wishes would happen to the (step)mother who stands in her way” (114).

The author believes that such fantasies, which are condoned by parents who read their children fairy tales, can help with the resolution of oedipal conflicts.

Fear of Fantasy: Why Were Fairy Tales Outlawed?

Bettelheim argues that it is irrational for adults to outlaw fairy tales in the belief they are harmful. Some parents object to fairy tales because they fear lying to their children owing to the make-believe world the tales present. However, children have different understandings of truth and want to be assured that the stories they are told address their most pressing concerns.

Rather than obstructing a child’s ability to cope with reality, fairy tales and the rich fantasy life they engender help, as an ability to imagine fantastical phenomena gives “the ego an abundance of material to work with” and stops it being trapped in narratives of wish-fulfillment (119).

The fairy tale’s detractors fear the grim content of fairy tales and the fact that witches and giants may be stand-in figures for parents; they instead give their children stories where the id is repressed. This attempt to deplete the unconscious is counterproductive, as the unconscious nurtures the ego. Moreover, watered-down storybook villains make the child feel truly alone with the most “monstrous” parts of their nature, whereas fairy tales show that even their most difficult feelings are normal and shared by others.

Transcending Infancy with the Help of Fantasy

A rich fantasy life can aid the transition from infancy to childhood, as the child moves away from their unrealistic expectations of being the receptacle of their parents’ unceasing gifts in favor of self-sufficiency. As the child grows up, they can feel the pressure of parental expectation in addition to disillusionment following their shortcomings. An ability to fantasize about a better future in which one has more influence and empowerment can help a child to cope and attain the next stage of development. Fairy tales can guide children to imagine their own futures optimistically. For example, a child may be dispossessed of the endlessly giving parents of their infancy whilst still living under the frustration of being dominated by them, but the child can use the fairy tale to imagine their own kingdom, a place where they are rulers of themselves. The fairy tale aids them to imagine the coming-of-age challenges they must face before ascending to such a privilege. Bettelheim explains, “[W]hile the fantasy is unreal, the good feelings it gives us about ourselves and our future are real, and these real good feelings are what we need to sustain us” (126).

Fairy tale fantasies can aid children with negotiating their problems. Bettelheim compares the fairy tale of “Rapunzel” to the more anodyne modern text of The Swiss Family Robinson, finding the latter text deficient in providing no witch figure onto which a girl can transfer her feelings towards a troubling maternal figure.

“The Goose Girl”: Achieving Autonomy

Bettelheim recounts another fairy tale: An old queen sends her beautiful daughter to a foreign land to be married. She is accompanied by her talking horse, Falada, and an attendant maid, and she takes a handkerchief with three spots of her mother’s blood on it.

On the journey, the maid says that she refuses to be the girl’s servant, and when the girl stops to drink at a stream, she loses her mother’s handkerchief with the blood and becomes weak. The maid takes advantage of her weakness and forces them to swap dresses; the maid now masquerades as the princess. She becomes the young king’s betrothed and chops off Falada’s head for the fear that the talking horse will give her away. Meanwhile, the true princess is employed as a lowly goose girl, helping a boy tend geese. When the old king asks the goose girl her story, she says she is bound by a vow to not tell anyone. However, she will tell it to the hearth, and the old king listens. After this, she receives royal garments and marries the young king. Under the pretense of seeking counsel, the old king asks the pretending maid (or false princess) to describe a punishment for an interloper, and she says that such a person should be put in a nail studded barrel and dragged up and down the street by two horses until she is dead. The old king proclaims that she, the maid, is the interloper and will be punished according to her own specification.

Bettelheim uses this story to illustrate his claim that the theme of a pretender usurping the hero’s place helps the child negotiate the oedipal conflict. At first, the child thinks the pretender is the same-sex parent who is keeping them from a union with the opposite-sex parent. Then, as they mature, the child will recognize themselves as the pretender who wants to take the same-sex parent’s rightful place. According to Bettelheim, the child learns from the story that it is safer to accept the maid’s childish impotent position than to usurp the place of a parent.

The next lesson is that the handkerchief spotted with blood symbolizes sexual maturity. By losing the handkerchief, the princess delays ascendance into maturity and being usurped as she is forced to take the childish, disempowered position of goose girl. She has been too weak and passive in succumbing to the maid, and it is not until she is able to mature and develop her own personality that a happy ending is possible. While adults worry that the punishments to evil figures such as the imposter maid disturb young children, Bettelheim resolves that “final success is experienced as meaningless by the child if his underlying unconscious anxieties are not also resolved” (141). Thus, the fairy tale must conclude with the destruction of the evil doer.

Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation

Bettelheim cites J.R.R. Tolkien’s idea that the elements of a good fairy tale are “fantasy, recovery, escape, and consolation—recovery from deep despair, escape from some great danger, but, most of all, consolation” (143). The consolation comes in the form of a happy ending. Bettelheim himself would add the element of threat to physical or moral existence to Tolkien’s list, as the child experiences their life as filled with dangers and unpredictable turns, such as when a normally loving parent becomes terrifying. Many fairy tales feature young protagonists being cast out on their own, which speaks to the terror of separation anxiety, the greatest threat of all as it hinders our survival and belonging. In saccharine modern fairy tales, the threats are minimized, meaning that the child often feels that the sense of justice has not prevailed.

On the Telling of Fairy Stories

Bettelheim insists that fairy tales work better when they are told to a child by an adult who has an active investment in both the child and the tale. Indeed, fairy tales evolved over the generations with each narrator adapting the story according to their unconscious instinct of what the child needed from the story. Often, children themselves will intervene, adding and embellishing details that speak to them, and the fantastical nature of the tales makes space for such spontaneous adaptations.

Rather than attempting to teach a moral through the telling of fairy tales, parents should focus on the “shared experience of enjoying the tale” (154), as child and parent become aware of which components speak to each other. The adult’s investment in the emotional aspects of the fairy tale creates in the child listener a sense of empathy that in turn makes them feel secure and more optimistic about growing up. The fairy tale will work on the child’s mind over time, as some elements will provoke immediate responsiveness, while the other will take deeper root in the unconscious.