Advantages And Disadvantages Of Fairy Tales

This essay argues that there are more advantages of reading fairy tales from a psychoanalytical viewpoint than disadvantages, with particular focus on Little Red Cape, Hansel and Gretel and Aschenputtel by the Brothers Grimm. I will use Bruno Bettelheim’s definition of psychoanalysis when arguing that there are more advantages in using a psychoanalytical approach to reading fairy tales than disadvantages. Bettelheim was a well-respected American clinical psychologist from the twentieth century. His controversial writings covered “vast territory and focused on topics ranging from society, art, education, the Holocaust, and fairy tales to child-rearing” (Meyer, William S. 2009: 275). Bettelheim defines psychoanalysis as being “created to enable …show more content…
The id operates unconsciously…and impels the organism to engage in need-satisfying, tension-reducing activities, which are experienced as ‘pleasure’ (Lapsley 2012: 395). According to Freud, ego is a “structure characterised by the function of mediating between the needs of the body and the reality constraints and which has a fundamental inhibitory function regarding the drives coming from the body, preventing their direct and immediate effect on behaviour” (Rizzolatti, et al. 2014: 146). Freud claims the “superego is in fact the heir to the Oedipus complex and is only established after that complex has been disposed of” (Frank 1999: …show more content…
Therefore, in this essay I am going to argue that there are more advantages of reading the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales from a psychoanalytic perspective than disadvantages, with a particular focus on both Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Cape. Firstly, I am going to focus on the advantages of reading Hansel and Gretel by the Brothers Grimm with a psychoanalytical approach. One psychoanalytical interpretation compares the witch’s death to an awakening, saying the witch is shoved in like a loaf of bread. The loaf of bread is something to eat, and the hungry child “wants to eat the mother who is represented in the dream as a cannibal witch…in order to do that, the child must awake” (Rheim 1992: 170). This reading is beneficial as it fits the idea of a child’s sexual awakening and how it is subtly conveyed through the Brother Grimm’s fairy tales. Bettelheim offers a different psychoanalytical approach when reading Hansel and Gretel, point out that the tale expresses the “anxieties and learning tasks of the young child who must overcome and sublimate his primitive incorporative and hence destructive desires” (Faber 1993: