A Scattering of Seeds

...I can only begin to suggest the uses of "Cinderella" by tabulating (as of course he does not) the surrogate mothers made available by the tale as a child's needs change...

...19th-century anthropologists found the tales monstrous, irrational and unnatural, full of totemism, taboo and cannibalism...

...Aware that the "pedestrian" technical vocabulary is at odds with the literary, he urges us to take its terms as metaphors not much different in their emotional connotations from those of the tales...

...Bettelheim cites the work of Jean Piaget to show that, for children, man can change into animal, streams are alive, even stones are only asleep...

...The author's concern with popularizing psychoanalytic theory inevitably sets two languages in competition, often with unwitting comic effect: "Since Beauty joins the beast only out of love for her father, she wishes to have an asexual relation with it...

...Nevertheless, his applications of tales to needs and desires are wonderfully apposite in the treatment of problems of psychic integration discussed in Part One of his book...

...There "Red Cap" disrobes at grandmother/wolf's bidding, gets into bed, and, after the short question period, is gobbled up...

...In anticipation of argument from the opposite quarter—that the tales are too easy, fulfilling wishes overnight (the popular wisdom knows why Artie Shaw called his autobiography The Trouble with Cinderella) —Bettelheim stresses the "learning tasks" performed by the heroes and heroines...

...his least satisfactory, of "Little Red Riding Hood...

...Red Cap then fills its stomach with stones so heavy that it falls dead...

...As for the cruelty and violence, what seems most fearful to the adult is often most soothing to the child...

...The language becomes much more immediate and, as we would expect from the man so close to disturbed children, the consolations are described with great sensitivity...

...Red Riding Hood follows the pleasure principle when "the situation requires acting according to the reality principle.' We get the impression occasionally that Bettelheim is congratulating the dragon (untamed id) and the dove (superego) for measuring up so smartly to the Freudian nomenclature...

...C'est tout...

...In fact, what adult, following the discussion of the separation anxieties suffered most painfully by the very young, is not himself solaced by the message of the bird that rescues the Turkish hero Iskender: "Know, that you are never deserted...

...But they lack for the layman the radiance they have for professionals, so we are relieved when he turns to the delights of the tales...

...If Freud is right that sexual curiosity is the beginning of all investigation, what are we to make of the mother's only advice: "Don't run off the path and don't peek into every corner" at grandma's...

...The first volume of the Grimm brothers' collection, for example, was banned by the city of Vienna as a work of supersti-tion...

...Few adults reading the 70 wonderful lines today will fail to see the story as an adult male sex fantasy, or be surprised to learn that it was all the rage at Versailles...

...Metaphorically speaking, she had better make the most of this phase since she is about to become (1) dead mother, loved and mourned, (2) tree showering gifts, or (3) fairy godmother...

...According to Bettelheim, Red Cap must kill the wolf herself...

...when the simpleton of "The Three Languages" studies the speech of animals, the father sees only signs of stupidity, "but actually the son has made some very important steps toward selfhood...

...More than a century later, the Grimms' version borrowed from an old myth to provide another ending: A hunter slits open the belly of the wolf and rescues the two females...

...if the hunter/father had done it, "she would never feel that she had overcome her weakness," that "she had learned her lesson...

...With "Little Red Riding Hood" Bettelheim is handicapped by confusion about the intended audience for the first written version, "Le Petit Chaperon Rouge," in the Mother Goose Tales (1697) of Charles Perrault...

...Perrault, for instance, was called the "bourgeois Homer," and Lenin believed that he could revise this material to provide "beautiful investigations on the hopes and longings of our people...

...As (step) mother she may be (4) Wicked Weaner, (5) rival for father, (6) partisan of nasty (step) siblings, (7) enforcer of sensible demands perceived as unreasonable, (8) exploiter who forces (permits) child to play in the dirt, (9) punisher who frees child of guilt for hatred, (10) sadist who has failed to resolve her own oedipal conflicts, (11) projection of the child's own rivalry, (12) most of the above in useful combination...

...Which is, of course, his point...

...The natural mother represents "basic trust," the goal of the first of Erik Erikson's "phase-specific psychosocial crises...

...Either way, a new audience for fairy tales...

...It's entertaining, in any case, to speculate about whether the sexual encounter with the wolf is the gobbling up or precedes it (Bettelheim and Erich Fromm differ here), and to wonder whether there is an oedipal resolution or—as Fromm says—the triumph of three generations of man-hating women...

...If we accept them, we will repossess the old literature...

...characters are good or bad, never in-between...

...if we do not, we must read it to debate his provocative book...

...Part Two, on oedipal conflicts, analyzes a dozen classics, each "reflecting some segment of man's inner evolution...

...Not the deeply troubled alone, but all children can be comforted...

...Not that Bettelheim engages Fromm, Jung or other analysts in doctrinal dispute, but variant readings suggest that, for all their universality, the symbols lend themselves to cultural adaptation...

...But he does more...

...The story, meanwhile, remains constant...

...Because Bettelheim assumes the old stories have been proscribed, or distorted out of recognition for whole generations, he retells many of them, thereby performing an act of recovery and restoration that alone would earn our gratitude...

...The old Hindu medicine actually prescribed a specific fairy tale for contemplation by an emotionally disturbed patient, Bettelheim tells us, going on to note that it doesn't do to be prescriptive—in one of his most felicitous phrases he compares storytelling to a "scattering of seeds...

...it helps him to deal with his own unconscious hatreds without fear of retaliation...

...Ironically, Freud's discovery of the destructiveness of the child's imagination gave some parents all the more reason not to add anything unsettling...

...It is true on the surface that, as W. H. Auden says, "without magic assistance the hero would be totally helpless...

...Although Bettelheim believes modern opposition to this literature bespeaks a narrow rationalism and a misunderstanding of children's interests, he must begin by attending to much older objections...

...This is metaphoric, or would be if the story itself were not so cautionary...

...Like many of these initiation tales, it urges the restraint—Bettelheim says the postponement —of female inquisitiveness...

...Nothing happens that can be called personally significant in the sense that his awareness of himself is altered.' And Bettelheim would agree that the changes are not spelled out—if they are we have a cautionary story, not a true fairy tale—but he finds important developments in the hero's self-knowledge: Little Red Riding Hood, emerging from the belly of the wolf, is "twice born.' older and wiser...

...For the autistic child, Bettelheim said in The Armed Fortress, "the law is, 'you must never hope that anything can change.'" In this book he quotes some of his ex-patients who have broken that law with the help of fairy tales...

...Yet it is precisely these primitive elements, no strangers to our dreams, that correspond to the child's animistic world view...

...Bettelheim complains that it leaves nothing to the imagination but, misled by some conventional tacked-on verses ("The sweet-talking wolf is most dangerous of all"), he dismisses it as too "cautionary," written by one who thinks it "better to scare children than to relieve their anxieties...

...His best reading is of the richly symbolic "Cinderella...

...Red Cap will wait for a more "age-appropriate" sexual encounter, at which time her mother will approve...

...but this left the child alone with his anxieties—without the chance to embody them, and thus to master them, that fairy tales provide...

...Same fool of a mother, notes a French critic, who failed to warn her about wolves...

...Bettelheim has offered us great riches...

...We have deprived our children of a unique art form that gives hope for the future while it "confronts them with existential predicaments" and helps them "civilize the chaotic pressures of their unconscious...

...Second thoughts about theory and method, irritation with his often cumbersome language, will not lessen our interest in his arguments or challenge his evidence that the fairy tale is indeed a work of art, its symbols universal...

...he shows us complexities in the stories that would never have occurred to us, except in our dreams...