Fear of Fantasy.

Bettelheim, B. (1976) The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Why do many intelligent, well-meaning, modern, middle-class par- ents, so concerned about the happy development of their children, discount the value of fairy tales and deprive their children of what hese stories have to offer?

Some people claim that fairy tales do not render “truthful” pictures of life as it is, and are therefore unhealthy. (p.116) Some parents fear that by telling their children about the fantastic events found in fairy tales, they are “lying” to them. (p.117)

Some parents fear that their children may get carried away by their fantasies; that when exposed to fairy tales, they will come to believe in magic. But every child believes in magic, and he stops doing so when he grows up. (p.118)

Other parents fear that a child’s mind may become so overfed by fairy-tale fantasies as to neglect learning to cope with reality. Actually, the opposite is true. Complex as we all are—conflicted, ambivalent, full of contradictions—the human personality is indivisible. Whatever an experience may be, it always affects all the aspects of the personality at the same time. (p.118)

Those who outlawed traditional folk fairy tales decided that if there were monsters in a story told to children, these must all be friendly —but they missed the monster a child knows best and is most concerned with: the monster he feels or fears himself to be, and which also sometimes persecutes him. By keeping this monster within the child unspoken of, hidden in his unconscious, adults prevent the child from spinning fantasies around it in the image of the fairy tales he knows. Without such fantasies, the child fails to get to know his monster better, nor is he given suggestions as to how he may gain mastery over it. As a result, the child remains helpless with his worst anxieties —much more so than if he had been told fairy tales which give these anxieties form and body and also show ways to overcome these monsters. (p.120)

without fantasies to give us hope, we do not have the strength to meet the adversities of life. Childhood is the time when these fantasies need to be nurtured. (p.121)

The fairy tale provides what the child needs most: it begins exactly where the child is emotionally, shows him where he has to go, and how to do it. But the fairy tale does this by implication, in the form of fantasy material which the child can draw on as seems best to him, and by means of images which make it easy for him to comprehend what is essential for him to understand. (p.122)

Wishing to be loved by their child, parents shrink from exposing him to tales which might encourage him to think of parents as bad or rejecting. Fairy tales are loved by the child not because the imagery he finds in them conforms to what goes on within him, but because—despite all the angry, anxious thoughts in his mind to which the fairy tale gives body and specific content—these stories always result in a happy outcome, which the child cannot imagine on his own. (p.123)