A young child’s mind contains a rapidly expanding collection of often ill-assorted and only partially integrated impressions: some correctly seen aspects of reality, but many more elements completely dominated by fantasy. Fantasy fills the huge gaps in a child’s understanding which are due to the immaturity of his thinking and his lack of pertinent information. Other distortions are the consequence of inner pressures which lead to misinterpretations of the child’s perceptions.
The normal child begins his fantasizing with some more or less correctly observed segment of reality, which may evoke such strong needs or anxieties in him that he gets carried away by them. Things often become so muddled in his mind that he is not able to sort them out at all. But some orderliness is necessary for the child to return to reality not weakened or defeated, but strengthened by this excursion into his fantasies.
Fairy tales, proceeding as the child’s mind does, help the child by showing how a higher clarity can and does emerge from all this fantasy. These tales, like the child in his own imagining, usually start out in a quite realistic way: a mother telling her daughter to go all by herself to visit grandmother (“Little Red Riding Hood”); the troubles a poor couple are having feeding their children (“Hansel and Gretel”); a fisherman not catching any fish in his net (“The Fisherman and the Jinny”). That is, the story begins with a real but somewhat problematic situation.
A child presented with perplexing everyday problems and events is stimulated by his schooling to understand the how and why of such situations, and to seek solutions. But since his rationality has as yet poor control over his unconscious, the child’s imagination runs away with him under the pressure of his emotions and unsolved conflicts. A child’s barely emerging ability to reason is soon overwhelmed by anxieties, hopes, fears, desires, loves, and hates—which become woven into whatever the child began thinking about.
The fairy story, although it may begin with the child’s psychological state of mind—such as feelings of rejection when compared to siblings, like Cinderella’s—never starts with his physical reality. No child has to sit among the ashes, like Cinderella, or is deliberately deserted in a dense wood, like Hansel and Gretel, because a physical similarity would be too scary to the child, and “hit too close to home for comfort” when giving comfort is one of the purposes of fairy tales.
The child who is familiar with fairy tales understands that these speak to him in the language of symbols and not that of everyday reality. The fairy tale conveys from its inception, throughout its plot, and by its ending that what we are told about are not tangible facts or real persons and places. As for the child himself, real events become important through the symbolic meaning he attaches to them, or which he finds in them.
“Once upon a time,” “In a certain country,” “A thousand years ago, or longer,” “At a time when animals still talked,” “Once in an old castle in the midst of a large and dense forest”—such beginnings suggest that what follows does not pertain to the here and now that we know. This deliberate vagueness in the beginnings of fairy tales symbolizes that we are leaving the concrete world of ordinary reality. The old castles, dark caves, locked rooms one is forbidden to enter, impenetrable woods all suggest that something normally hidden will be revealed, while the “long ago” implies that we are going to learn about the most archaic events.
The Brothers Grimm could not have begun their collection of fairy tales with a more telling sentence than the one which introduces their first story, “The Frog King.” It starts, “In olden times when wishing still helped, there lived a king whose daughters were all beautiful, but the youngest was so beautiful that the sun itself, which has seen so much, was astonished whenever it shone in her face.” This beginning locates the story in a unique fairy-tale time: the archaic period when we all believed that our wishes could, if not move mountains, change our fate; and when in our animistic view of the world, the sun took notice of us and reacted to events. The unearthly beauty of the child, the effectiveness of wishing, and the sun’s astonishment signify the absolute uniqueness of this event. Those are the coordinates which place the story not in time or place of external reality, but in a state of mind—that of the young in spirit. Being placed there, the fairy tale can cultivate this spirit better than any other form of literature.
Soon events occur which show that normal logic and causation are suspended, as is true for our unconscious processes, where the most ancient and most unique and startling events occur. The content of the unconscious is both most hidden and most familiar, darkest and most compelling; and it creates the fiercest anxiety as well as the greatest hope. It is not bound by a specific time or location or a logical sequence of events, as defined by our rationality. Without our awareness, the unconscious takes us back to the oldest times of our lives. The strange, most ancient, most distant, and at the same time most familiar locations which a fairy tale speaks about suggest a voyage into the interior of our mind, into the realms of unawareness and the unconscious.
The fairy tale, from its mundane and simple beginning, launches into fantastic events. But however big the detours—unlike the child’s untutored mind, or a dream—the process of the story does not get lost. Having taken the child on a trip into a wondrous world, at its end the tale returns the child to reality, in a most reassuring manner. This teaches the child what he needs most to know at this stage of his development: that permitting one’s fantasy to take hold of oneself for a while is not detrimental, provided one does not remain permanently caught up in it. At the story’s end the hero returns to reality—a happy reality, but one devoid of magic.
As we awake refreshed from our dreams, better able to meet the tasks of reality, so the fairy story ends with the hero returning, or being returned, to the real world, much better able to master life. Recent dream research has shown that a person deprived of dreaming, even though not deprived of sleep, is nevertheless impaired in his ability to manage reality; he becomes emotionally disturbed because of being unable to work out in dreams the unconscious problems that beset him.24 Maybe someday we will be able to demonstrate the same fact experimentally for fairy tales: that children are much worse off when deprived of what these stories can offer, because the stories help the child work through unconscious pressures in fantasy.
If the dreams of children were as complex as those of normal, intelligent adults, where the latent content is much elaborated, then the child’s need for fairy tales would not be so great. On the other hand, if an adult was not exposed as a child to fairy tales, his dreams may be less rich in content and meaning and thus serve him less well in restoring the ability to master life.
The child, so much more insecure than an adult, needs assurance that his need to engage in fantasy, or his inability to stop doing so, is not a deficiency. By telling fairy tales to his child, a parent gives the child an important demonstration that he or she considers the child’s inner experiences as embodied in fairy tales worthwhile, legitimate, in some fashion even “real.” This gives the child the feeling that since his inner experiences have been accepted by the parent as real and important, he—by implication—is real and important. Such a child will feel later in life like Chesterton, who wrote: “My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery.… The things I believed most in then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales.” The philosophy which Chesterton and any child can derive from fairy tales is “that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege.” It is a view of life very different from that which “true-to-reality” stories convey, but one more apt to sustain one undaunted when meeting the hardships of life.
In the chapter of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy from which these quotations come, titled “The Ethics of Elfland,” he stresses the morality inherent in fairy tales: “There is the chivalrous lesson of ‘Jack the Giant Killer,’ that giants should be killed because they are gigantic. It is a manly mutiny against pride as such.… There is the lesson of ‘Cinderella,’ which is the same as that of the Magnificat—exaltavit humiles (He lifted up the humble). There is the great lesson of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ that a thing must be loved before it is loveable.… I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by fairy tales.” When he says that fairy tales are “entirely reasonable things,” Chesterton is speaking of them as experiences, as mirrors of inner experience, not of reality; and it is as such that the child understands them.25
After the age of approximately five—the age when fairy tales become truly meaningful—no normal child takes these stories as true to external reality. The little girl wishes to imagine she is a princess living in a castle and spins elaborate fantasies that she is, but when her mother calls her to dinner, she knows she is not. And while a grove in a park may be experienced at times as a deep, dark forest full of hidden secrets, the child knows what it really is, just as a little girl knows her doll is not really her baby, much as she calls it that and treats it as such.
Stories which stay closer to reality by starting in a child’s living room or backyard, instead of in a poor woodcutter’s hut hard by a great forest; and which have people in them very much like the child’s parents, not starving woodcutters or kings and queens; but which mix these realistic elements with wish-fulfilling and fantastic devices, are apt to confuse the child as to what is real and what is not. Such stories, failing to be in accord with the child’s inner reality, faithful though they may be to external reality, widen the gap between the child’s inner and outer experience. They also separate him from his parents, because the child comes to feel that he and they live in different spiritual worlds; as closely as they may dwell in “real” space, emotionally they seem to live temporarily on different continents. It makes for a discontinuity between the generations, painful for both parent and child.
If a child is told only stories “true to reality” (which means false to important parts of his inner reality), then he may conclude that much of his inner reality is unacceptable to his parents. Many a child thus estranges himself from his inner life, and this depletes him. As a consequence he may later, as an adolescent no longer under the emotional sway of his parents, come to hate the rational world and escape entirely into a fantasy world, as if to make up for what was lost in childhood. At an older age, on occasion this could imply a severe break with reality, with all the dangerous consequences for the individual and society. Or, less seriously, the person may continue this encapsulation of his inner self all through his life and never feel fully satisfied in the world because, alienated from the unconscious processes, he cannot use them to enrich his life in reality. Life is then neither “a pleasure” nor “a kind of eccentric privilege.” With such separation, whatever happens in reality fails to offer appropriate satisfaction of unconscious needs. The result is that the person always feels life to be incomplete.
When a child is not overwhelmed by his internal mental processes and he is well taken care of in all important respects, then he is able to manage life in his age-appropriate manner. During such times he can solve the problems that arise. But watching young children on a playground, for example, shows how limited these periods are.
Once the child’s inner pressures take over—which happens frequently—the only way he can hope to get some hold over these is to externalize them. But the problem is how to do so without letting the externalizations get the better of him. Sorting out the various facets of his outer experience is a very hard job for a child; and unless he gets help, it becomes impossible, once the outer experiences get muddled up with his inner experiences. On his own, the child is not yet able to order and make sense of his internal processes. Fairy tales offer figures onto which the child can externalize what goes on in his mind, in controllable ways. Fairy tales show the child how he can embody his destructive wishes in one figure, gain desired satisfactions from another, identify with a third, have ideal attachments with a fourth, and so on, as his needs of the moment require.
When all the child’s wishful thinking gets embodied in a good fairy; all his destructive wishes in an evil witch; all his fears in a voracious wolf; all the demands of his conscience in a wise man encountered on an adventure; all his jealous anger in some animal that pecks out the eyes of his archrivals—then the child can finally begin to sort out his contradictory tendencies. Once this starts, the child will be less and less engulfed by unmanageable chaos.