Freud & Bettelheim

Freud’s essay on the “Uncanny” can be said to have defined, for our century, what literary criticism once called the Sublime. This apprehension of a beyond or of a daemonic—a sense of transcendence—appears in literature or life, according to Freud, when we feel that something uncanny is being represented, or conjured up, animistic conceptions of the universe, and is produced by the psychic defense mechanisms Freud called repression.

It would have seemed likely for Freud to find his literary instances of the uncanny, or at least some of them, in fairy tales, since as much as any other fictions they seem to be connected with repressed desires and archaic forms of thought. But Freud specifically excluded fairy tales from the judgment are provoked. Thus Freud, alas, found fairy tales to be unsuited to his own analysis.

However, the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, with a kind of wise innocence, has subjected fairy tales to very close, generally orthodox, and wholly reductive Freudian interpretations. Bettelheim’s book, although written in apparent ignorance of the vast critical traditions of interpreting literary romance, is nevertheless insights into how young children read and understand.

Bruno Bettelheim’s major therapeutic concern has been with autistic children, so inevitably his interpretive activity is directed against a child’s tendency to withdraw defensively or abnormally. According to Bettelheim, a child’s desperate isolation, loneliness, and inarticulate anxieties are addressed directly by fairy tales. By telling the child such stories themselves, parents strengthen telling, parents impart to the child their approval of the stories.

But why should fairy tales, in themselves, be therapeutic? Bettelheim’s answer depends on the child’s being an interpreter: “The fairy tale is therapeutic because children find their own solutions, through contemplating what the story seems to imply about their inner conflicts at this moment in their lives.” Bettelheim proceeds on the basis analyst, attempting to find helpful patterns in the stories, thus read alike, though in different vocabularies.