Jack Zipes – On the Use and Abuse of Folk and Fairy Tales with Children

1978, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly

Prologue

When I first wrote the following essay in 1977, I was greatly angered by what I felt to be the authoritarian tone and fallacious arguments of Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, which is still widely used and acclaimed as a great and perspicacious study of fairy tales. Little did I know at that time -and little did the general public know -that my critique of his work was minor and temperate compared to the critiques of his activities as a psychologist and his published works that followed his death by suicide in 1990. Two excellent biographies, Bettelheim, a Life and a Legacy by Nina Sutton 1 and The Creation of Dr. B.: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim by Richard Pollak, 2 go into great detail about the scandals and the sad and troubled life of this famous man. After reading them, one could easily come to the conclusion that he was a charlatan, forger, liar, bully, and oppressor -which he was. But he was also extraordinarily dedicated to helping disturbed children and experimenting with practices and ideas that would enable them to function “normally” and happily in society. He deeply believed that human beings could be changed through psychotherapy and that they could successfully adapt to their environment if enough proper care and attention were paid to them. The difficulty is that Bettelheim undermined his life’s work and good intentions by using dubious methods and experiments that have harmed numerous people and by disseminating ideas about therapy and literature that are misleading. As we now know, Bettelheim was fond of exaggerating the truth and concealing his ignorance by forging stories about himself and intimidating critics and adversaries with phony knowledge and unsubstantiated claims. For instance, he never studied with Freud in Vienna. He spent very little time in a concentration camp to grasp fully the desperate situation and the fortitude of the prisoners. He was fortunately released through the influence of family friends. Later, in the United states, he never did adequate research in studying the effects of concentration camp life on the victims. He lied about his academic credentials and background in psychology when he came to the United States. According to many children and counselors at The Orthogenic School in Chicago, he was abusive, secretive, and authoritarian and never allowed experts to witness the practices and processes that he developed to cure troubled children. In fact, the 85% success rate that he claimed for the School has never been proven or documented. His written English was so poor that all his books had to be doctored. He never read fairy tales to his children or developed a method of using fairy tales with children. His knowledge of children’s literature, reading habits, and preferences was abysmally low. As Alan Dundes, one of the foremost scholars of folklore in America, has carefully demonstrated, many of the ideas in his book The Uses of Enchantment were plagiarized from Julius Heuscher’s A Psychiatric Study of Fairy Tales: Their Origin, Meaning and Usefulness (1963), nor does Bettelheim evince any understanding of folklore. The list of his forgeries and crimes is endless. But does that mean that we must condemn everything that he did and wrote? The simple answer is: of course not. Bettelheim was a cultivated man of doxa, an opinionated man, who represented his opinions as truth. As Sutton and Pollak make amply career, he was deeply disturbed most of his life -traumatized by his father’s death due to syphilis and by his experiences in the concentration camp that left him somewhat paranoid and ambivalent about his Jewishness. He was also filled with rage that he “successfully” managed to channel through his work and through living life through fictions, as Pollak has astutely observed. 3 He could be charming, brazen, and pathetic, and he left indelible marks on all those who knew and worked with him. Yet, the extent to which anyone could appreciate the “essential” or “true” Dr. Bettelheim is in doubt. The truth about him and his life may never fully be known, but we can certainly determine what is fictitious and abusive in his writings. In is in this spirit that I am reprinting the following essay with some slight changes. What I intuited in 1977 is, I believe, valid as we enter the twenty-first century.

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Bruno Betheleim – The Uses of Enchantment: Book Critique by Jonathan Acuña (2018)

RESURRECTING DEAD FAIRY TALES: A Jack Zipes Lecture