Bettelheim Among the Folklorists

Psychoanalysis and folklore have been uneasy bedfellows. Any psychoanalytic interpretation of folktales makes folklorists twist and turn. Their reactions have ranged from ambivalent acceptance to unequivocal rejection. Psychoanalysts, on the other hand, are ever too ready to consider such a reaction as denial, or at least avoidance of the “true” meaning of fairy tales. As a psychoanalyst, Bruno Bettelheim could have bridged between the two disciplines with his book The Uses of Enchantment . His valuation of orality, his erudite familiarity with the classical sources of European folktales, and his sheer love for the fairy tale, qualified him for mediating the two disciplines. Surely, Bettelheim did not conceive of himself as a broker between two intellectual fields. However, by writing such a book this role was inevitably thrust upon him. The assessment of his success or failure requires, first, the examination of the theoretical, methodological, and attitudinal conflicts between folklore and psychoanalysis. Secondly, there is a need to clarify the charges of plagiarism that were brought against Bettelheim, and finally a need to evaluate his methodological contribution to the psychoanalytic interpretation of the fairy tale.

In an essay that has since become a “classic” of folklore scholarship, William Bascom (1954) discusses the Freudian approach to folklore, recognizing its import and yet expressing reservations about its merit. He writes:

The psychoanalytical school provides well-known answers to what have been considered atrocities and obscenities, based largely on the identification of sex symbols and the Oedipus and Electra situation in

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myths. Some of the contradictions between folklore and culture are thus explained as wish fulfillment or escape from sexual taboos on a fantasy level by mechanisms comparable to those found in dreams or daydreams. (p. 340)

Later, taking a cross-cultural perspective, he adds:

Whatever one may think of the