Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature

1. Kids, Fairy Tales, and the Uses of Enchantment

1 T he idea that the fairy tale is an appropriate narrative genre for children predates psychoanalysis , but psychoanalysis nurtured that idea, building upon existing associations of childhood and primitive/folk culture. Psychoanalytic advocacy for the fairy tale began long before Bruno Bettelheim made the case in The Uses of Enchantment (1976). Bettelheim mobilizes familiar psychoanalytic arguments about the fairy tale, while addressing the issue of children’s literature directly. Bettelheim disparages modern children’s books and insists that the fairy tale is the real children’s literature, exactly because it is so psychologically useful. Fairy tales, he thought, encourage children to work through various unconscious dilemmas. But Bettelheim could teach us how to read fairy tales psychoanalytically because Sigmund Freud had already learned from fairy tales and incorporated them into psychoanalytic discourse. By the time Bettelheim published his book, the fairy tale was understood not simply as a genre of children’s literature but indeed as its foundational and thus most important genre. Thus Leslie Fiedler declares that fairy tales “are the first form of ‘children’s literature’” (1973, xi). William Kerrigan and Jack Zipes agree, calling the fairy tale “the primal form of children’s literature” (Kerrigan 1985, x) and “the 1. Kids, Fairy Tales, and the Uses of Enchantment 2 kids, fairy tales, and enchantment classical genre for children” (Zipes 1983; this is part of the subtitle to his Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion). This chapter proposes that psychoanalytic attention to the fairy tale helped enshrine it as a cornerstone of children’s literature and child development. The fairy tale is perhaps not so representative of children’s literature; not all fairy-tale scholars see it as a children’s genre. Psychoanalysis helped consolidate its status as such. At the same time, psychoanalysis took a cue from the fairy tale and from discourse about the fairy tale’s function and importance. We can see in the themes and forms of psychoanalysis the influence of fairy-tale discourse as well as the other way around. We do have to look more closely to see the former, because psychoanalysis did not profess interest in children’s literature until well into the twentieth century. Earlier, psychoanalysis expressed interest in the fairy tale as a children’s form, one showing up in patient histories and overlapping with common dream material. Rather than conceptualize the fairy tale as children’s literature, however, Freud and subsequent analysts approached it in the context of folk culture, with its alleged correspondences to the primitive mind. For Freud, the fairy tale belonged not to children’s literature but rather to the individual child, even when the same tale surfaced in multiple case histories. Even so, some understanding of fairy tales as the narrative stuff of childhood was operative in psychoanalysis. As much as Bettelheim, Freud knew that fairy tales were useful to analysts as well as to children and their caregivers. This chapter examines the interrelation of psychoanalysis and the fairy tale, in and around the question of children’s literature. I show how Freud and others capitalized upon but were also instructed by fairy-tale discourse, so that psychoanalysis has certain fairy-tale correlates . The chapter also explores the consequences of this interrelation for psychoanalysis, for children’s literature, and for the study of children ’s narrative. The psychoanalytic study of the fairy tale heightened the genre’s status as children’s literature—as canon, in a sense—even as it gave fairy-tale and children’s literature studies a critical method and a strong psychoanalytic inflection. Psychoanalysis, in turn, has been kept relevant and useful by its association with fairy tales. The relationship between psychoanalysis and the fairy tale might be described as symbiotic, mutually dependent and beneficial. kids, fairy tales, and enchantment 3 Freud and Fairy-Tale Discourse Fairy-tale scholars largely agree that the fairy tale came to be thought of as primarily for children in the eighteenth century, as adult literate and literary culture moved in other directions and as the fairy tale migrated in association from the folk to the child-folk, to unlettered and ostensibly simple people. Whereas the folktale is still associated with folkish adults, the fairy tale is widely presumed to be a form of children ’s literature.1 There are various scholarly accounts of this transformation and its consequences. As Maria Tatar notes, the “process by which adult entertainment...