The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales

From the Publisher

The famous child psychologist, Bruno Bettelheim, explains how fairy tales educate, support, and liberate the emotions of children.

From the Publisher

The great child psychologist gives us a moving revelation of the enormous and irreplaceable value of fairy tales - how they educate, support and liberate the emotions of children.

Review

John Updike - New York Times Book Review
"Bettelheim has written a charming book about enchantment, a profound book about fairy tales....What is new, and exciting, is the warmth, humane and urgent, with which Bettelheim expounds fairy titles as aids to the child's growth, which he understands as a growth through conflicts, the chief conflict being Oedipal ...'The Uses of Enchantment' cannot enforce the use of fairy stories without a matrix of family security and social consensus; but at least it shows us how cunningly, how lovingly, the anonymous generations of 'a happier age' prepared their children for the challenges of life and guided them toward sexual, ethical health, once upon a time."

Review

Alison Lurie - Harper's
"Much of what has been written about fairy tales over the past hundred years, by psychologists as well as by folklorists, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics, seems to be unknown to [the author]....According to Bettelheim, the prejudice [against fairy tales] can have serious and destructive social effects....In my experience, it is not only adolescents deprived of fairy tales who take up with drugs and gurus. Still, if Bettelheim's long and well-argued defense convinces one parent to start telling his children bedtime stories, or persuades a single nervous teacher not to ban 'Jack and the Beanstalk' and 'Snow White', we should be grateful."