His primary audience is a group of people that has the most influence over children. The importance of letting a child figure through a story and how he or she interprets that story should have been the focus of the entire book, seeing as how Bettelheim is writing this to: “help adults, and most especially those with children in their care, to become more fully aware of the importance of such tales,” (19).īy his own admission Bettelheim is not writing this book for other scholars to analyze but for adults who have contact with children, chiefly parents. While I agree with both statements, I feel Bettelheim should have given more explanation of them. Bettelheim does little to further expand on this point except to say that when people explain the meaning of a fairy tale to children, it robs those children of a chance to figure something out for themselves (18). This leads directly to the next, almost commonsense, point that Bettelheim makes, “the fairy tale’s deepest meaning will be different for each person, and different for the same person at various moments in his life” (12). They provide the child with an opportunity to live vicariously through the story’s hero/heroine and find solutions to problems they may have to deal with later in life.
They tell the child: if you do this you get happiness, if you do that then you will be unhappy. In playing out different scenarios, the fairy tales teach a child by example. Specifically, he mentions that fairy tales provide “a moral education which subtly, and by implication only, conveys to the advantages of moral behavior” (5). In his introduction, “The Struggle for Meaning,” Bettelheim mentions numerous times that fairy tales are important for child.
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I believe his downfall in this instance was his reliance on Freudian psychoanalysis and his refusal to consider any other version of the tale than the Grimm’s “Little Red Cap.” As it stands, I believe that Bettelheim’s Freudian analysis of the tale is severely flawed and, in fact, completely contradicts the major point of his introduction that children must be free to create their own interpretations of a story. However, once he begins his actually analysis of the stories, especially “Little Red Riding Hood,” his arguments become vague, unsupported and in some cases highly improbable. In this part of his book, Bettelheim presents clear, concise arguments. To do otherwise is to provide a disservice to the child. Specifically, he mentions that it is crucial for a child to form his or her own opinions and interpretations of a story.
In his The Uses of Enchantment Bruno Bettelheim presents a compelling argument as to the importance of fairy tales in a child’s life.
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