When I was a child, the popular books for kids included the Nancy Drew mysteries, the Bobbsey Twins, and the Hardy Boys. I loved burying myself in these stories that involved other youth who were trying to find their place in the world. But I also had a passion for fairy tales. I found them at the center of each fat red volume of The Book of Knowledge that my parents had bought from a traveling book salesman.
There is much fine fiction today written especially for young people. But while they offer practical guidelines for encountering the everyday, many of these works tend to be one-dimensional, unable to move the child’s deeper psychological processes. Except in the hands of a very great writer, realism doesn’t capture the imaginative faculty in quite the same way as fantasy does (Bettelheim 4). There are no echoes of forgotten layers of the psyche, no resonances of the compelling creatures that visit children’s dreams.
Some psychologists view the passages in human life as developmental. Julius Heuscher points out “that human development is not something continuous and gradual, but occurs in phases. Each phase may show its origins in the preceding one and contains the seeds for the following ones; yet each phase has its own distinct characteristics” (115). Fairy tales have a unique role in this process. They stimulate children’s developmental phases in several ways.
Children identify with the characters they’re reading about. A hero/heroine who has navigated a particular stage shows the child how to do it. In “Hansel and Gretel,” both characters escape from the wicked witch and flee the forest of the unconscious with a duck’s help. “Hansel and Gretel” also offers a heroic male and female model for the reader. Bettelheim points out that “fairy tales have great psychological meaning for children of all ages, both girls and boys, irrespective of the age and sex of the story’s hero” (19).
We need to develop our heroic qualities so we can meet all the challenges we’ll experience and to arouse our courage. According to Bettelheim, this is exactly the message that fairy tales get across to the child in manifold form: that a severe difficulties in life are unavoidable. They’re an intrinsic part of human existence. If we don’t shy away but steadfastly meet unexpected and often unjust hardships, we can master all obstacles and at the end emerge victorious (8).
For children who fear they can’t manage in the adult world, a heroic figure can be an inspiration, becoming part of their personality structure and offering encouragement at crucial developmental stages. Such encouragement may not be consciously experienced but is present subliminally in corridors of the mind that we seldom have access to except through our dreams. In Bettelheim’s words, “Fairy tales enrich the child’s life and give it an enchanted quality just because he does not quite know how the stories have worked their wonder on him” (8).
The stories also can correspond with a developmental phase that we are experiencing, such as fear of abandonment or anxiety about separation. The discomfort we got through can be experienced at a distance by projecting onto the story’s characters. (Of course, this can happen, too, from reading realistic literature, but not quite so dramatically or with the same depth—certainly not with the same “magic.”) Fairy tales speak simultaneously to all levels of our personality so they are capable of reaching the deeper layers of our minds. It’s as if the grannies that originally told the stories are whispering soothingly into our ear without others being aware of the message’s content since it would be individual for each person.
Fairy tales also can help us face death, smaller deaths as well as the ones that are more shattering. Learning to navigate the stages of our life involves confronting death, for each new stage attained requires the death of a previous one. Since deaths in fairy tales often happen to those who aren’t authentically alive (for example, Rumpelstiltskin, who feeds off the maiden’s fears and is not a fully developed being), as children we have an easier time of letting go of those parts that aren’t truly ours: the difficult step-mother; a wicked half-brother or sister; someone/thing we no longer need to be related to. Deaths in fairy tales prepare us for the fact that death is an intrinsic part of life—central to it. There is death in all growth. The child also discovers the cyclic nature of death; there is a new birth or new beginning as the cycle repeats itself.
As we move from childhood into adulthood, we need to discover how to express impulses in controlled ways that are acceptable to our culture and not suppress them. Besides encouraging us in the ways already mentioned, fairy tales give us safe, contained opportunities to experience wishes and desires that otherwise would be suppressed and regarded as witch-like tendencies in ourselves or acted out inappropriately. In other words, rather than acting out an impulse—such as the desire to kill our parents or to batter a sibling—in a harmful way, a fairy tale can provide release from this need, especially the classic ones that don’t hold back from expressing the less civilized side of humans. Given that children live much closer to the archaic, “primitive” level of personality than the normal, civilized adult, their fears of unruly feelings are much more intense and need an outlet.
Unless we as children have a blueprint in mind that allows for more than the mundane, then we will probably not get beyond the practical visible world as adults. Perhaps this is why W. H. Auden believed so strongly that fairy tales should be an educational requirement not just for children but for adults as well. We need to know of the eternal perspective—there is much we can’t fathom with our rational consciousness—so that life doesn’t become meaningless. Fairy tales facilitate this way of perceiving by connecting us to the mysteries and keeping them alive.
Fairy tales are vital to our development because they stimulate levels of the psyche not reached by other forms of literature and prepare our minds for a variety of adult experiences, ranging from the darkest to that which gives greatest joy. While helping us to maneuver various developmental stages, they also make us aware that struggle is a healthy and necessary part of existence: we need to meet a problem and wrestle with it until a resolution is reached. While including fairy tales in our lives will help fertilize the mythic dimension, they also suggest there is more to life than what is visible in the material world, reminding us that transformation of ourselves and our environment is possible.
Works Cited
Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.
Heuscher, Julius E. A Psychiatric Study of Myths and Fairy Tales. 2d edition. Springfield, Illinois: Thomas, 1974.