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This defense of the fairy tale provides the hard, glistening surface of Bettelheim's book; the very title The Uses of Enchantment suggests utility over literary delight, therapy before amusement. Deep within the volume are less convincing "proofs" of this attitude. The legends of Snow White, of Hansel and Gretel, of Goldilocks are parsed for every psychological nuance. Here the reader leaves the nursery for what Vladimir Nabokov calls "the fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents." To Bettelheim, Goldilocks' peek into the bears' house "evokes associations to the child's desire to find out the sexual secrets of adults ..." The number of bears is also darkly allusive: "In the unconscious, the number three stands for sex because each sex has three visible sex characteristics: penis and the two testes in the male; vagina and the two breasts in the female."
Freudian Simples. In Hansel and Gretel the gingerbread house stands for "oral greediness." An analysis of Snow White descends to pure jargon: "The queen, who is fixated to a primitive narcissism and arrested in the oral incorporative stage, is a person who cannot positively relate ..." The doctor's narrow Freudian couch allows no room to turn around. Versions that do not accord with orthodox analysis are jettisoned; Disney's version of Snow White, for example, is psychologically useless to the child because each dwarf has a separate name and a distinctive personality. This "seriously interferes with the unconscious understanding that they symbolize an immature, pre-individual form of existence which [the heroine] must transcend."
Such dogma tends to remind the reader of a remark attributed to the father of analysis: that while a cigar was a phallus it was also a cigar. The humor of Sneezy, Dopey and Doc, the excursions of Hansel cannot be reduced to Freudian simples. The wolf in Little Red Riding Hood is more than the "potentially destructive tendencies of the id"; he is a wolf as well. Of course a child walks in a giant's world. Of course boys and girls dream of transformations into wondrous and powerful creatures, i.e., adults. Of course the tears and truths of the human condition reside within these stories. But there are many truths. At the beginning of this century, Chesterton praised fairy tales because they provided the child a "St. George to kill the dragon." For Poet W.H. Auden, a reading of the Grimm Brothers could serve to "restore to parents the right and the duty to educate their children." Between these two terminals there are millions of valid interpretations — as many as there are readers and critics. Pace Bettelheim, enchantment has more uses today than did once upon a time.