Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Bettle & Darn
I was first introduced to Bettleheim in my Psychological Anthropology class in the fall of 2008 and I could not have been more annoyed and confused with his psychobabble adapted from Freudian theory. I am just being narrow minded but his argument seems flawed. His background as an educator and therapist for severely disturbed children jaded his work in my opinion. I don't know that these fairy tales are the best medium for children to make sense of their inner turmoil. Since these tales differ in various communities and since these tales have unrealistic/magical elements, it seems odd to me to use a specific version of a tale to make sense of prohibitions and taboos. Additionally, who is to say exposure to the nitty gritty of life leads to victory in the end? I'm not saying sugar coat everything in life because at some point, the child will come into contact with an issue (maybe not to the magnitude that is expressed in the fairy tales) but instead, maybe fairy tales have more practical use as a cultural artifact as Darnton suggests. Darnton acknowledges the pop culture aspect of fairy tales and how it can be used to probe into that set time. It is kind of like music to me. Back in the days, R&B music had more meaning; it was militant, it was making social commentary, it was a unifier but now, its all about sex, aggression but occasionally something more meaningful and respectful. What does that say about artists today or consumers who support their music? What does that mean about the people back then and what was important to them?...Is everyone thinking about the same music as me? Of course not, because there are different genres that took other things seriously and threw others to the wind. Darnton's use of fairy tales is similar to me; fairy tales aren't necessarily going to give you the answer but at the same time, it gives you somewhere to start some kind of analysis based on different regions, prevalent symbols and different story endings. Anyway, I thought Darnton's article was more compelling/believable, otherwise, I'm still struggling for meaning.
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I think you may be coming down a bit too harshly on Bettelheim. Yes, perhaps he’d be better qualified to speak on what is best for children if his research were not focused on the “severely disturbed,” and certainly he needs to operate in specifics if his ideas are to make any sense. But I agree with his belief that the fairy tale is the perfect medium through which children can engage with whatever unspoken desires and fears they have, especially when discussion of such fears and desires seems to be under censure by the children’s parents and other adults. Now, obviously we don’t need to read kids tales of incest and cannibalism to help them deal with the monsters in their closet, but the power of unconscious symbolism and association in literature is immense. If the wolf in the woods plays the same role in a story as a school bully does in a child’s life, who’s to say that reading the story couldn’t be a cathartic, constructive experience for the child? One might say that we might as well encourage kids to read stories about triumph over school bullies then, but the magical nature of fairy tales is exactly what allows this learning process to be most effective. Telling a child to be confident or brave or moral doesn’t seem to be terribly useful in my experience, but what about showing them how to be those things in a context slightly removed from real life (so as to not seem didactic)?
ReplyDeleteI realize I’ve watered down Bettelheim’s point quite a bit, and certainly the process described above wouldn’t apply to too many of Grimm’s fairy tales (at least the ones we’ve read so far). But we shouldn’t let a little psychobabble prompt us to throw the baby out with the bathwater.