Editor Reviews:

Product Description:
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.

Rating : - Heroism and the Existential Predicament of life

Bruno Bettleheim again becomes the fount of great sanity and wisdom. In this seemingly innocent book, on the same statue as Joseph Cambell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces," or Ernest Becker's "Denial of Death" and his "Birth and Death of Meaning," or indeed even Freud's "Civilization's and its Discontents," this giant of our era, lays out a map of how we think using the morality of Fairy Tales as his raw material and as a springboard to the real subtext of the book which is: How man is to deal with his own problems of existence.

What he tells us is basically this: that for all peoples of all races, the primary problem of life is developing smoothly into adulthood and overcoming the inherent psychological debilities of youth and immaturity -- namely overcoming narcissistic disappoints, unearned entitlements, self-doubts, oedipal dilemmas, sibling rivalries, relinquishing childhood dependencies, gaining a feeling of selfhood, self-mastery, self-respect and self-worth, and eventually developing a sense of moral obligation, duty and responsibility. In this life project, and at all ages, the unconscious is the most powerful determinant of our behavior. Obviously, not understanding the role that it plays as a determinant in our behavior means that many of us will never fully mature into adulthood. We first need to learn to understand what is going on within our conscious selves in order to then be able better to cope with that which goes on and affects us from the unconscious.

Bettleheim tells us that we can achieve this understanding, and with it an ability to cope, not always through logic and rational comprehension of the nature of the content of the unconscious, but most often by becoming familiar with it through tales, myths, legends, dreams, and daydreams - ruminating, rearranging, and fantasizing about suitable story elements in response to weakly perceived unconscious pressures. By doing this, we learn slowly to fit unconscious content into various aspects of our conscious lives in our own way and at our own speed. That is to say that through our dreams, simulated games, myth-making, and other ways of fantasizing, and even through our art, music and dramas, we learn to better deal with the unconscious content buried deep inside our minds.

It is here that fairy tales for the child, and myths of heroism for the maturing adult, have unequaled value. This is true because they both offer new dimensions of discovery and new modalities for the imagination to cling to. For the adult, especially adult males, myths of heroism open up a shared stage for the playing out of collective subconscious dramas, dramas of narcissism, and of illicit (even Oedipal) desires, of repressed hatred, imaginings of being a hero in ones own self-scripted drama, etc. - all things whose relevant dimensions are embedded deeply within the unconscious.

In various ways, art, our fantasies, that is the imagined stage, the tales of heroism, the dramas upon which they are based, and their respective scripts are but sublimated and simulated ways of release that allow us to play out the things animating our unconscious feelings in a more or less safe and harmless way. The Fairy Tales that we tell our children, are nothing but a stripped-down versions of how we relate to our own unconscious mind.

Bettleheim tells us, the same as does Freud and Becker, that when the unconscious is repressed and its content denied direct entrance into awareness, then it will find indirect ways to express itself and the person's conscious mind will be partially overwhelmed by derivatives of these subconscious elements. They will seep out in less acceptable and less respectable ways. Or else, as the pressures build up and there are no avenues of release, a person is forced to keep such rigid, compulsive control over them that his personality may become severely warped and crippled. But when unconscious material is allowed to escape into consciousness, even to a small extent, and is allowed to work its way through a person's imagination and fantasies, its potential for causing harm - to himself and to others - is often very much reduced. Some of its forces, as is the case with the arts, can in fact be redirected to serve positive purposes.

However, and this is a key point of Bettleheim's analysis, the conventional mode of operating our everyday lives is to run away from things that trouble us even in the least, not to mention things that bother us most. We also teach this lesson to our children -- both directly, by blocking any un-pleasantries from their eyes and from entering their lives -- and indirectly, by our own examples of mental jujitsu where we invariably end up in the land of fantasy and escapism, often a very great distance away from reality. Formless and nameless anxieties, chaos, anger, violent fantasies, sexual repression, pressing everyday problems, etc. are often the source of many of our problems.

But since we have learned to operate on the unwritten cultural law that only conscious reality matters, and that it always should be pleasant and wish-fulfilling, we turn our heads away from the un-pleasantries of life. The dominant American culture, for instance, chooses to pretend that the dark side of America does not exist. In fact a cottage industry has been built on the premise that wish-fulfilling thoughts can somehow "will into existence" a "much dreamed of" problem-free life.

One of the main ways that we get sidelined from finding a direct route to maturity and mastery over our own inner demons and thus reaching complete closure to adulthood, is through the kind of personal denial we engage in when we refuse to face the fact that most of what goes wrong in our lives has to do with our very own human natures. We tell ourselves that most of our problems lie outside ourselves, outside our own carefully build categories and "constructs," outside our basic rules of conduct and our basic natures, that is outside of our own self-proscribed cultures and humanities. But the truth is that even when they are not internally caused, most of the problems driving our lives come from the seven sins that have been driving human nature from time immemorial. They serve to shape our humanity as much as they shape our everyday activities, and certainly as much as anything else does. And of course they do so from deep within the psyche, well beneath consciousness.

According to this great child psychologist, the problems that define our lives are more often than not sublimated spin-offs of negative feelings that we have about ourselves, or that others have about us, or about themselves. Either that or, they are about our respective uncertain relationships to the world outside us. When we don't act aggressively, selfishly, angrily, antisocially, or thoughtlessly, we can usually cope with the other problematic aspects of life, no matter from where they might originate.

As Professor Bettleheim tells us, and as we learned from Dostoevsky's novels, from Shakespeare's dramas, from Ernest Becker's writings, and from Sartre philosophy, as well as from others such as Professor Cornel West, neither psychoanalysis nor existentialism was invented to make life easier for us, but to enable us to accept the problematic nature of life without being defeated by it, or giving in to escapism. As one other reviewer noted, and as Professor West has emphasized in his writings, even Freud's best prescription for life is that we have no choice but to struggle courageously against overwhelming odds if we are to wring any meaning out of our existence.

Anyone who has read Cornel West's Reader would know this and will readily recognize that Bruno Bettleheim's philosophy is the foundation stone upon which West's Chehovian Christianity is built. Only in West's writing have I seen anything quite as powerful as this. This is heady stuff and will make the reader thirst for more. Ten stars.