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

One of Bettelheim’s key objectives in writing The Uses of Enchantment is to defend the fairy tale from modern educators who denounce it as too violent for young children. Instead, such moderns prefer tamer realistic narratives that, on the surface, appear to mirror an urban American 20th-century child’s predicament more closely than a fairy tale set in a medieval-seeming European setting. For his part, Bettelheim finds such modern children’s literature too “shallow in substance that little of significance can be gained” (4). Such stories, in Bettelheim’s view, do not address a young child’s developmental problems, and they leave children feeling alone with their darkest and scariest imaginings. These stories’ wishful portrayal of a world where everyone is good seems untrue to children who “know that they are not always good” (7), and, being exposed to such literature exclusively, children risk becoming monsters to themselves. Conversely, fairy tales—which show young protagonists facing monsters and adults who want to destroy those protagonists prior to the happy ending—give the child reader a sense that they, like the protagonist, can cope with their most challenging problems.

Bettelheim remarks that the advent of psychoanalysis showed the truth about the destructive and sadistic nature of a child’s imagination, whereby he “not only loves his parents with an incredible intensity of feeling, but at times also hates them” (120).