Bettelheim makes several claims in this book which are supposed to apply to all children, and therefore can be exploded by a single child behaving in a way incompatible with his model. His most important theory -- the titular "meaning and importance of fairy tales" -- is that children hear fairy tales allegorically, as narratives of the ego gaining control over the id and the individual progressing from a lesser stage of emotional development to a greater. Therefore, they do not have sympathy for villains of stories who are tortured to death, or for supporting characters killed in the course of the story (the reference cases for these two being "The Three Little Pigs," with the two younger pigs eaten by the wolf and the wolf boiled alive by the oldest pig); nor do they identify with the villain of a story, nor do they easily identify with a hero or heroine of the opposite sex. Based on my personal experience, all of these statements are false by the time a child is about four years old; I would go further and say that anyone not capable of feeling sympathy for a wolf boiled alive or a witch burned at the stake or a stepmother rolled down a hill in a barrel full of nails, together with anger at those who perpetrate such things, is a brute.

The message Bettelheim claims to see in fairy tales would be a dangerous one even if it was fully reliable. The message he claims is present is that the integration of the id, ego, and superego means not just that the individual has himself under control, but that he is invincible, at least symbolically "the right person for the highest office on Earth" (p. 102, on the subject of the Grimms' "The Three Languages"). The resultant "psychology of invincibility" -- the conviction that the person will always succeed, or deserves to succeed -- is one which the events of life do not respect, and which can turn out very poorly for the one who holds this mentality; for an extreme case of this self-destructiveness (aided and abetted by another product of this sort of socialization, an inability to sympathize with one's opponent or antagonist), see Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character.

Additionally, there are problems with holding up Bettelheim as a major figure in psychoanalysis. Bettelheim had a doctorate in art, not psychology -- he lied about his credentials. Moreover, this book contains plagiarism; another reviewer mentions Julius Huescher's A Psychiatric Study of Myths and Fairy Tales; Their Origin, Meaning, and Usefulness as a 'source'. Can someone who lies about his credentials and plagiarizes other writers really be trusted to do accurate psychiatric analysis?

His personal demons were probably the driving force behind a lot of his analysis, as they were for Freud himself (and for Jung). Some of these demons were eminently excusable -- he spent a year in Buchenwald -- but others were much less so, and all of them damaged the clarity of his reasoning and thought.

If you're considering reading the book to get the message that telling fairy tales to children is better than not telling them, then be aware that it is, and you don't need a long book of Freudian theory to prove it. Fiction gives its reader data about life experiences without requiring them to have lived through such experiences themselves, and makes the analysis of these experiences easier because the reader has a full picture of what's occurring and a certain measure of emotional distance from the events; and this is just as true for children as it is for adults. Don't buy the book just to learn that... and don't buy the book in general, since its author is unreliable, and its theory both self-sabotaging and inaccurate.

(Review also posted on Amazon.com.) ( )

Upfront: Bruno Bettelheim was a fraud and a jerk -- but... this is a great examination of the "hooks" in fairy tales. This book has been on my shelf since I was a teenager. If you want to rewrite a fairy tale, this book is a damn good place to start your research. ( )

Fascinating book that explains a great deal. I'd shorten by about half, dropping all the Freudian interpretations, but if you put your psychoanalytic filter on before you read it, it makes a lot of sense. Every parent should read this book.

This book reminds us how folk tales and fairy tales served so much more than just entertainment back in their day, they were lessons to children.
But like any study, this is sided to one persons opinion. ( )

Freud meets fairy tales! A highly controversial book, I gather. It's a bit of a single-minded study. ( )