Narrow Couch

By Stefan Kanfer

THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT

by BRUNO BETTELHEIM 328 pages. Knopf. $12.50.

Once, in a certain country, there lived a great sage named Bruno Bettelheim. Rich in experience, wise beyond his 72 years, Dr. Bettelheim had survived the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald to become the most celebrated child psychologist of his time. He had written of autism in infants and prejudice in adults, of social change and mental unbalance, and each book had become a classic. Now he turned his searching intelligence upon a rich and neglected topic: the fairy tale.

In The Uses of Enchantment Dr. Bettelheim finds that these adventures are not mere bedtime stories. They are life divined from the inside. Once decoded they can be apprehended as allegories of unconscious terror and yearning. "To the child," Bettelheim writes in this provocative and quirky book, "and to the adult who, like Socrates, knows that there is still a child in the wisest of us, fairy tales reveal truths about mankind and himself."

Animistic Universe. One of these truths concerns the duality of human response. A child's mother is usually perceived as benign and loving. But she may also be seen as arbitrary and punitive. In the tales, this harsher figure can be masked as a witch or wicked stepmother. The father, alternately protective and threatening, is usually cast in the role of giant or king. In these guises, the author believes, parents may be disliked and defeated without guilt or remorse.

Another truth concerns the child's profound craving for the miraculous. The very young live in an animistic universe, where chairs have souls and conversations take place with dolls and trees. Fairy tales mirror these credences --but place them in perspective. Through the nerves the child learns that a kick at a door hurts the foot, not the door. Through the narratives a child understands that the supernatural belongs, in the words of the Grimms' Frog Prince, "in the old days, when wishing still helped." When actuality intrudes too abruptly upon the child's world, the price may be prohibitive. Argues Bettelheim: "Many young people, who today suddenly seek escape in drug-induced dreams, who apprentice themselves to some guru ... or who in some other fashion escape from reality into daydreams... were prematurely pressed to view reality in an adult way."

This defense of the fairy tale provides the hard, glistening surface of Bettelheim's book; the very title The Uses of Enchantment suggests utility over literary delight, therapy before amusement. Deep within the volume are less convincing "proofs" of this attitude. The legends of Snow White, of Hansel and Gretel, of Goldilocks are parsed for every psychological nuance. Here the reader leaves the nursery for what Vladimir Nabokov calls "the fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents." To Bettelheim, Goldilocks' peek into the bears' house "evokes associations to the child's desire to find out the sexual secrets of adults ..." The number of bears is also darkly allusive: "In the unconscious, the number three stands for sex because each sex has three visible sex characteristics: penis and the two testes in the male; vagina and the two breasts in the female."

Freudian Simples. In Hansel and Gretel the gingerbread house stands for "oral greediness." An analysis of Snow White descends to pure jargon: "The queen, who is fixated to a primitive narcissism and arrested in the oral incorporative stage, is a person who cannot positively relate ..." The doctor's narrow Freudian couch allows no room to turn around. Versions that do not accord with orthodox analysis are jettisoned; Disney's version of Snow White, for example, is psychologically useless to the child because each dwarf has a separate name and a distinctive personality. This "seriously interferes with the unconscious understanding that they symbolize an immature, pre-individual form of existence which [the heroine] must transcend."

Such dogma tends to remind the reader of a remark attributed to the father of analysis: that while a cigar was a phallus it was also a cigar. The humor of Sneezy, Dopey and Doc, the excursions of Hansel cannot be reduced to Freudian simples. The wolf in Little Red Riding Hood is more than the "potentially destructive tendencies of the id"; he is a wolf as well. Of course a child walks in a giant's world. Of course boys and girls dream of transformations into wondrous and powerful creatures, i.e., adults. Of course the tears and truths of the human condition reside within these stories. But there are many truths. At the beginning of this century, Chesterton praised fairy tales because they provided the child a "St. George to kill the dragon." For Poet W.H. Auden, a reading of the Grimm Brothers could serve to "restore to parents the right and the duty to educate their children." Between these two terminals there are millions of valid interpretations -- as many as there are readers and critics. Pace Bettelheim, enchantment has more uses today than did once upon a time.

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