For hundreds of years fairy tales have played an integral role in child development.
According to Bruno Bettelheim, fairy tales speak directly to children’s unconscious world, helping them to work through “id-related” and narcissistic pressures, oedipal conflicts and sibling rivalry. Children’s stories are often shallow and superficial in content, focusing on helping children to acquire reading skills, but fairy tales seem to offer richness and complexity, offering children new dimensions to their imaginations, encouraging inner growth, transformation, resources and valuable life direction towards moral maturity.
Little Red Riding Hood, for example, is a cautionary story for the prepubescent child about the dangers of succumbing to the pleasure seeking (Freudian) “id” element of seduction. Because children don’t understand “inner transformation”, the fairy tale makes this visible and tangible for them, for example Red Riding Hood being swallowed by the wolf, cut out of his belly and popping up again, unscathed. An existential crisis externalised.
Snow White is the archetypal story of a young girl’s right of passage from innocence, a prepubescent existence of passivity and latency (while living with the underdeveloped, pre-oedipal dwarfs) to sexual and emotional maturity. The oedipal conflict with her stepmother, warns of the dangers of narcissism, which becomes the ultimate downfall of the mother figure and near undoing of Snow White herself after accepting gifts from the stepmother. The father and huntsman are both ambivalent figures who fail to defend Snow White wholly.
An owl, a raven and dove come to mourn the apparently dead Snow White. All three are birds of the spirit, with the owl symbolising wisdom, the raven memory and consciousness and the dove love and unifying harmony. A young girl has to develop these three qualities in order to evolve from innocence to maturity. The birds not accidentally form a trinity, and they even mirror the three colours of Snow White (red, black and white) or perhaps she reflects them.
When using fairy tales in counselling, it is empowering for youth to reinvent an alternative version of the particular fairy tale, for example, asking how Little Red Riding Hood or Snow White might have more agency or authority.
. Marguerite Black from Somerset West is an author, therapist, mentor and coach with an honours degree in Psychology and MA in Creative writing. She is the author of The Dandelion Diary: The Tricky Art of Walking and founded the NPO The Dandelion Initiative, which offers creative arts therapy, play therapy and trauma counselling to disadvantaged youth. She can be contacted via email at cmblack@mweb.co.za.
