The book is divided into two main sections. The first, "A Pocketful of Magic," outlines Bettelheim's thoughts on the value of fairy tales for children. The second part, "In Fairy Land," presents psychoanalytical readings of several popular fairy tales, specifically:
The "animal groom" cycle of fairy tales, including "Beauty and the Beast", "The Frog Prince" and "Bluebeard".
Bettelheim presents a case that fairy tales help children solve certain existential problems such as separation anxiety, oedipal conflict, and sibling rivalries. The extreme violence and ugly emotions of many fairy tales serve to deflect what may well be going on in the child's mind anyway. A child's unrealistic fears often require unrealistic hopes. And furthermore, "The Frog King" may be superior to modern sex education in that it acknowledges that a child may find sex disgusting, and this may serve a protective function for the child. In his introduction, Bettelheim stated that he was writing the book as “an educator and therapist of severely disturbed children.” However, after his death his credentials in those fields were found to be faked, and Bettelheim had only taken three introductory classes in psychology.
Reception and influence
In the U.S., Bettelheim and The Uses of Enchantment won the 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and the 1977 National Book Award in category Contemporary Thought. Robert A. Segal writes, "It is the disjunction between Bettelheim's up-to-date approach to fairy tales and his old-fashioned approach to myths that is striking." The Uses of Enchantment has been cited as an influence in many subsequent works that utilise fairy tales in adult terms, including the 2011 Catherine Hardwicke film Red Riding Hood and the 2014 fantasy horror filmRed Kingdom Rising. It was claimed by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine as the inspiration for their 1986 musical Into the Woods.
Plagiarism
In the Winter 1991 edition of the peer-reviewed Journal of American Folklore, Alan Dundes, then a 28-year veteran in the anthropology department at the University of California, Berkeley, presented a case that Bettelheim had copied key passages from A Psychiatric Study of Myths and Fairy Tales: Their Origin, Meaning, and Usefulness by Julius Heuscher without giving appropriate credit, as well as unacknowledged borrowing from other sources. Dundes states that Bettelheim engaged in "wholesale borrowing" of both "random passages" and "key ideas," primarily from Heuscher's book, but also from other sources. Heuscher himself stated that he was not bothered by the disclosures. Robert A. Georges, a professor of folklore at UCLA, states "it is clear he didn't do his homework." Julius Heuscher himself did not consider it a big deal. He said, "We all plagiarize. I plagiarize. Many times, I am not sure whether it came out of my own brain or if it came from somewhere else.... I'm only happy that I would have influenced Bruno Bettelheim. I did not always agree with him. But that does not matter. Poor Bruno Bettelheim. I would not want to disturb his eternal sleep with this." Dundes also states that his own 1967 article on Cinderella was borrowed by Bettelheim without acknowledgement. Jacquelyn Sanders, the director of the Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago in 1991, said she did not believe many people would agree with Dundes's accusations. She stated, "I would not call that plagiarism. I think the article is a reasonable scholarly endeavor, and calling it scholarly etiquette is appropriate. It is appropriate that this man deserved to be acknowledged and Bettelheim didn't.... But I would not fail a student for doing that, and I don't know anybody who would ." In reviewing a biography of Bettelheim in 1997, Sarah Boxer of the New York Times wrote, "Mr. Pollak gives a damning passage-for-passage comparison of the two ."
