The Meaning and Importance of the Fairy Tale

I learned about and decided to read The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales from the documentary Room 237, which is about various interpretations of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film The Shining. The documentary is quite good, I've watched it several times with great interest. The book is mentioned along with Freud's writing on the uncanny which Kubrick mentioned as an influence in an interview. 

"In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life.” 

The uncanny feeling is an encounter with something that was once familiar but has been forgotten, like seeing a ghost of a deceased loved one. Children Freud noted don't experience the uncanny, at least like adults to, due to their more magical and animistic mindset.

"Fairy tales quite frankly adopt the  standpoint of the omnipotence of thoughts and wishes, and yet I cannot think of any genuine fairy-story which has anything uncanny about it.

"...this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old—established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression.

"We—or our primitive forefathers—once believed in the possibility of these things and were convinced that they really happened. Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted such ways of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new set of beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation. As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to support the old, discarded beliefs, we get a feeling of the uncanny."

Stanley Kubrick definitely had The Uses of Enchantment in mind when directing The Shining 1980. Wendy remarks when being shown the large kitchen that she would have to leave a trail of bread crumbs everytime they come in there, a reference to Hansel and Gretel who find their way home after being left by their parents in the forest using a trail of breadcrumbs. Danny locks his father in the freezer, like the witch was locked in the furnace by Gretel, which is when the only truly supernatural event happens in the movie; the door unlocks on its own. When Jack is terrorizing his family with an ax, around the "here's Johnny!" scene, he quotes from the three little pigs; "little pigs, little pigs, let me come in! Not by the hair on your chinny-chin-chin. Then I'll huff, and I'll puff...and I'll blow your house in!" 

The Shining can be seen as a modern fairy tale itself. Danny uses the magical power of his visions to uncover the true nature of the overlook hotel and is pitted in a face to face Oedipal struggle with a mad giant, his father. The hotel is high up in the Colorado mountains, like the home of the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk. If The Shining is a fairytale then it's a fairytale for adults. Most of the film's events can be explained naturalistically as family dynamics and psychology until the end of the film which relies on horror tropes (the scene with the skeletons and cobwebs). The presentation of the uncanny is done very well by Stanley Kubrick and lets adults experience what was once familiar but is now forgotten, and as Freud said better experienced in art than in reality. 

Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment which came out four years prior to The Shining is like The Shining a valuable way for adults to confront the magic of fairy tales, though in an intellectual way. Bettelheim was an Austrian-American child psychologist, known for the controversial theory that lack of maternal warmth is responsible for autism, who adopted Freud's as well as Carl Jung's psychoanalytic theories for his work. The concepts of id, ego, ego-ideal, and superego are the adult way to understand the fairy tale. Such concepts like the motifs and archetypes of fairytales are useful stand ins to find the personal meaning of such stories much as the concepts of matter, energy, and space are used to study the universe though they still are human constructions of language (inertia for example originally meant an indolent person). So long as such concepts relate to facts and are useful in explaining given phenomena then we ought to use them.

"If we, as adults, must take recourse to the creation of separate entities to bring some sensible order into the chaos of our inner experiences, how much greater is the child's need for this! Today adults use such concepts use such concepts as id, ego, superego, and ego ideal to separate our internal experiences and get a better grasp on what they are all about. Unfortunately, in doing so we have lost something which is inherent in the fairy tale: the realization that these externalizations are fictions, useful only for sorting out and comprehending mental processes."

Bettelheim's advocacy for the telling of fairy tales to children came at a time when picture books, television cartoons, and animated Disney movies came to be used by parents to entertain and "educate" children about life whether intentionally or not. These mediums are all visual and mass produced. Fairy tales used to be related orally, probably by women,  in illiterate societies, and reflected the culture of the time, the details changing over time while retaining a basic structure. What happened is that fairy tales started to be written down in collections by upper class educated men, the likes of the Brothers Grimm and Joseph Jacobs in the 19th century, and commercially sold on the market. The growth of industrial capitalist society has something to do with this, as well as the formation of national identities which the sharing of these tales developed. The power of the fairy tale however has been the personal way it is told and its archetypal nature which can't, or at least shouldn't, be copyrighted to any individual. Fairy tales and their power precede societies of mass production and consumption, individualism, scientific understanding and control of nature. Fairy tales are almost always set in the past or some different place where nature is still mysterious and anthropomorphic, a world less under rational control but more familiar, "once upon a time."

Communicating fairy tales verbally is the most primal way available to us. Humans are very visual creatures, whereas most mammals rely on hearing and smell, like dogs. The unfamiliar smell of the mailman is not dissuaded upon seeing the uniform for the dog. Hearing in some ways is more powerful than seeing. One can turn one's head or close one's eyes to avoid sight, but this isn't available for hearing. Before bed your parent will tell a story and you will hear something whether you like it or nor. Oral language is very powerful this way, dependent on movement of several organs and different with each person. It is much easier to manipulate visual stimuli than to manipulate sounds. This is why we have drawings and paintings from thousands of years ago, but not sound recordings before the 19th century. Telling stories verbally is a very different experience, more primal and unique . While one can visually recreate a scene with great detail, unless one records sounds with a device it isn't as easy to reproduce the way it was, even if remembered correctly. A sheet of music from Ancient Rome wouldn't mean the same if it was played for those today. 

Telling fairy tales in the original way is very important for children's emotional and intellectual development. The fairy tale represents in a distorted way the inner feelings and conflicts everybody goes through in early life in an acceptable way to a child's mind. Animals have minds like us, magic is real, wishes can affect reality, things can transform into different things easily. It is speculated first by Frazer in The Golden Bough 1890 and then by Sigmund Freud in the essay Animism, Magic, and the Omnipotence of Thoughts from Totem and Taboo 1913 that human civilization progressed through different stages of thought: magic, religion, and then to science. Early humans most likely didn't separate their thoughts, feelings, and intentions from animals and inanimate objects and so attributed to them human qualities, and also animal/natural qualities to themselves. Humans children are unique among animals for playing with dolls, attributing thoughts feelings and intentions to them. The first theories of the world were rooted in our own psychology. Its probably the case that playing with dolls and childlike thinking was a necessary stage to for the development of consciousness, in which we learn a theory of mind, that other people can think like we do. We "moderns" relegate thinking which was once the norm to early life and repress it later in life. Nevertheless we must come to integrate and explore to a degree such thinking to become successful adults and members of society. Just like those who aren't exposed to religion early in life and raised in an overly rational way can become susceptible later in life to cults and bizarre ways of thinking. Something like this happened to John Stuart Mill who learned Latin and Greek before age five had a mental breakdown at twenty. For Mill his break with childhood belief was in utilitarian rationalism, and recovered by reading romantic poetry. 

"If a child is told only stories 'true to reality'...then he may conclude that much of his inner reality is unacceptable to his parents."

The goal of the fairy tale is to integrate different and often conflicting aspects of the self and relations to others in a psychologically satisfying way, the process Jung called individuation. Fairy tales are marked by optimism, usually with happy endings in which danger or challenge is overcome or avoided with a lesson learned or something gained.  Sometimes there is an aspect of vengeance, like the boiling of the wolf in red riding hood or the burning of the witch in Hansel and Gretel. This is all in contrast to fables, like those of Aesop, which are moralistic and have a clear causal relationship between what action and consequence. The ant and the grasshopper ends with the grasshopper perishing in the cold because he didn't work hard when it was warmer, and we're supposed to identify with the ant who doesn't take him in and works hard for himself.

Different aspects of the child and adult are presented together though in different ways to make them psychologically acceptable. "Fairy tales offer figures onto which the child can externalize what goes on in his mind, in controllable ways." The tales are works of conflict resolution by which these different aspects of the child's relationship to the world can be resolved. Some stories present the duality of the sibling relationship, like in Hansel and Gretel in which one sibling saves the other from the witch, succeeding without the help of the other. The three little pigs represent different stages of mental develop argues Bettelheim. The three houses represent advances in protection against nature: straw huts to wood homes and to brick houses. This demonstrates it is possible to defend ourselves from nature using our minds. The three pigs are the child at different stages at mental development, with the hope that he too will be able to grow up and defend against external threats. The wicked stepmother allows the child to confront negative aspects of their mother/female caregiver. The grandmother in little red riding hood is replaced with a rapacious wolf, much how the same grandmother can be both caring and then furious at other times. The giant in Jack and the beanstalk represents aspects of one's own father. Jack's mother is a widow and by stealing from the giant and killing him is able to provide for his mother to live heavily ever after. This is an Oedipal story, as well as a transgressive one in which a boy breaks into a home and steals from an individual he doesn't know or has wronged him. 

Fairy tales achieve integration between the id and ego and build a sense of self. Myths operate to build and strengthen the superego over the ego, instilling a sense of common history, morals, stories of heroism, cosmologies, and often stories of the gods. This is what Homer and Hesiod gave to western society. Myths can bring to the individual a sense of pessimism in which they or society isn't living up the ideals embodied in the myth. Myths or at least aspects of them can never be disproved for those who believe in them, whereas fairy tales are recognized for what they are as we grow into adulthood. Fairytales relate much more to personal meaning and development than myths and because of that don't lose their power if not based in history or fact. Fairytales are almost always set in the past and familiar historical settings that are culturally relevant, but don't afford exact localization in time and space, much like the unconscious itself. 

The benefit of fairy tales is that they allow exploration of wishes in a disguised way with only temporary consequences. Wishes are fulfilled in a safe way within the linear archetypal structure of a story. The promise of the fairy tale is that one day we'll be able to frame the events of our lives in a way in which we can overcome life's challenges through the power of our own understanding. Rash wishing doesn't have permanent consequences and a lesson can be learned. A child's mind however is not prepared to directly confront the sources of their desires and anxieties. The content of children's dreams says Bettelheim are not as symbolic as that of adults. In the story Rapunzel when the prince finds her in the wilderness she has been exiled to after the tower, she has twins with her. To a child this could demonstrate that sex is not where children come from, though to adults it implies she and the prince did something else during tower visits than chat. 

The psychological truth is that our notion of reality is something that develops over our lives. The ego has not yet gained control over the id; the pleasure principle rules over the reality principle. Human intelligence takes a good deal of time to develop, much as it took millions of years for the species to evolve. The thinking part of the brain, the cortex, develops after the older "lizard brain" in common with other animals. As adults we can look at these tales for what they are and go from the literal to the latent content, but we should not expect our children to do so. 

The Uses of Enchantment is a landmark work of child psychology (which won a National Book Award) using psychoanalytic theories of mind which is also of use to adults to realize the latent meaning of fairy tales that makes them so important to all of us. The real meaning of things is often hidden to us, even into adulthood. This is mostly for our benefit so we can approach things in a familiar way and so we can move on in our lives. But some of us moderns have forgotten too much that was apparent to illiterate preindustrial society. We've come to rely on the image over the word (pictures, film, and television) to connect us with the world when the most important thing for us are the personal relationships to one another. As Goethe said, man never realizes how anthropomorphic he is.