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Summary: Why and How to tell your children fairy tales
Review: The central idea of this book is that fairy tales, above all other literary forms, are ideally suited to help children deal with issues of growing up. Bettelheim presents the features fairy tales have in common, such as the triumph of a young and previously devalued person over powerful enemies and extreme hardships. He shows how fairy tale exaggerations are actually truer to children's perceptions than "realistic" stories are, and so better address their needs. He goes into detail about the problems particular fairy tales address, such as how Cinderella handles sibling rivalry and emerging sexuality. While Bettelheim follows Freud, he acknowledges that Freudian constructs such as the id are useful metaphors, not absolute truths. He provides valuable insights into the worth of fairy tales, including the important point that their metaphorical nature is a vital part of their function. The underlying meanings, which are often scary, should not be explicated for children, who will come to terms with them in their own time.
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Summary: Read with a grain of salt
Review: While reading this book I found many ah-ha moments. I found it inspirational in getting my creative writing juices flowing and in showing even more reasons for why not censoring fairy tales is good for children. That being said, I also found myself questioning many of the authors arguments. I know very little about freudian psychology and while I can easily accept the idea of the id, ego, and super ego standing as metaphors for instict, self, and conscience, I did have a hard time with all of the oedipal references. Still, I accepted them in terms of the tension between a child and his same sex parent as he comes of age rather than the desire to have the opposite sex parent all to himself. I also felt uneasy about the fact that the children he was referencing seemed far more disturbed than the normal child and I highly doubt that not exposing your child to fairy tales will cause such damage to a child. Still, I was aware that he was a child psychologist and accepted that the children he had most contact with were the more disturbed children so that is why he chose them for his frames of reference. The first real problem I had with the text, however, was when he made reference to autism and a child who was "cured of autism". Later in the text he mentions a study where there was a group of children who were familiar with violent fairy tales, and a group of children who were only familiar with the watered down versions. Both groups were showed violent films. Bettelheim claimed that the group exposed to the fairy tales reacted less aggressively to the films. I found this interesting but poorly cited which makes me wonder about the ligitamacy of this assumption. Reading other reviews and finding out more about Bettelheim's history helped me put the reading into perspective. I will probably only recomend this book to people with an interest in literary analysis or fantasy writing to serve as an inpiration, but I would add a disclaimer about his questionable credibility.
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Summary: THE ABUSES OF DR. B
Review: While this book is widely embraced by educators, psychoanalysts, children's TV programmers and others, it is important that people reading it know some background about the author, Bruno Bettelheim. I suggest you read Richard Pollak's "The Creation of Dr. B," which deals with Bettelheims suspect credentials and methodology. For an even quicker primer, look at the Amazon.com on-line reviews of another Bettelheim book, "The Empty Fortress," a completely discredited and misguided work that blamed autism on "refrigerator moms" and poor parenting, thereby setting back appropriate treatment of this condition and hurting a generation of families and children.
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