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Unfortunately for Dieckmann, this book is an object lesson in the lengths to which publishers will go to produce a saleable product. It is one thing to get a famous psychoanalyst like Bruno Bettelheim to write a foreword; it is quite another to let him overwhelm the whole theme and purpose of the book with a few masterly strokes. Bettelheim mentions Dieckmann three times. The first is an acknowledgement of how interesting he finds the book; this is followed immediately by: ‘Dieckmann, being a Jungian psychoanalyst, relies mainly on Jungian interpretations of fairy tales; they can equally well be understood from a Freudian perspective.’ Bettelheim then proceeds to give a brilliantly condensed case presentation of his own to show how it is really done, remembering Dieckmann just in time to add the final three-line paragraph: ‘So too with the cases Dieckmann narrates, since through his sensitive understanding and appreciation of the importance of favourite childhood fairy tales he has been able to cure many patients’.
As if this were not enough, Dieckmann's text suffers from some stilted translation, typographical errors, and such a dense mixture of the theoretical and the popular that one feels as if one were reading a series of lectures cobbled together with a prestigious Bettelheim foreword, as a publishing venture pure and simple. It is a classic example of ‘publish and let the author be damned’.
Beset with these indignities, Dieckmann's text struggles to illuminate its meaning. His main intention is to show the vital connection between fairy tales and the reality of the psyche by comparing fairy-tale motifs with relevant case material. The aim is clearly to demonstrate the therapeutic benefit of ‘getting to know the myth that rules one's life without one's knowing or choosing’ (JUNG). The author covers a lot of familiar ground, for instance the symbolic significance of fairy tales and their relevance to adult life, but his most interesting work is the chapter on one