The Uses of Enchantment
Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Bruno Bettelheim |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Fairy tales |
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Publication date
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1976 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 352 |
| ISBN | |
| 398.45 | |
| LC Class | GR550 .B47 |
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales is a 1976 book by Austrian-born American author Bruno Bettelheim, in which Bettelheim analyzes fairy tales in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis.
Bettelheim presents a case that fairy tales helps children solve certain existential problems such separation anxiety, oedipal conflict, and sibling rivalries. The extreme violence and ugly emotions of many fairy tales serve to deflect what may well be going on in the child's mind anyway. A child's unrealistic fears often require unrealistic hopes. And furthermore, "The Frog King" may be superior to modern sex education in that it acknowledges that a child may find sex disgusting, and this may serve a protective function for the child.
The book is divided into two main sections. The first, "A Pocketful of Magic," outlines Bettelheim's thoughts on the value of fairy tales for children. The second part, "In Fairy Land," presents psychoanalytical readings of several popular fairy tales, specifically:
In the U.S., Bettelheim and The Uses of Enchantment won the 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the 1977 National Book Award in category Contemporary Thought.
Robert A. Segal writes, ""It is the disjunction between Bettelheim's up-to-date approach to fairy tales and his old-fashioned approach to myths that is striking."
In the Winter 1991 edition of the peer-reviewed Journal of American Folklore, Alan Dundes, a 28-year-old veteran in the anthropology department at the University of California, Berkeley, presented a case that Bettelheim had copied key passages from A Psychiatric Study of Myths and Fairy Tales: their origin, meaning, and usefulness (1963 and rev. ed. 1974) by Julius Heuscher without giving appropriate credit, as well as unacknowledged borrowing from other sources.
Dundes states that Bettelheim engaged in "wholesale borrowing" of both "random passages" and "key ideas," primarily from Heuscher's book, but also from other sources. Heuscher himself stated that he was not bothered by the disclosures. Robert A. Georges, a professor of folklore at UCLA, states "it is clear he [Bettelheim] didn't do his homework."
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