“By dealing with universal human problems, particularly those which occupy a child’s mind, these stories speak to his budding ego and encourage its development, while at the same time relieving preconscious and unconscious pressures” (p. 6). The reality of the fairy tale is not that of the external world, says Bettelheim: “No sane child ever believes that these tales describe the world realistically” (p. 117). The fairy-tale kings and queens, with their arbitrary power, are not the unjust authorities of the world of history and politics, but rather the monarchs of the child’s daily life, the father and mother. The prevalence of evil stepmothers in fairy tales is attributed by Zipes and other critics to the frequency in earlier centuries of death in childbirth, which left widowers to take new wives hostile to the first wife’s children. Bettelheim, however, sees the evil stepmother character not as a product of actual historical conditions, but as a psychological stand-in for the cruel, angry, or rejecting side of the real mother, who can then be idealized, in the person of the dead biological mother, as all good and loving. This interpretation is substantiated by the fact that after the first edition, Wilhelm changed mothers to stepmothers in “Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs” and “Hansel and Grethel.”

The extremes of absolute good and evil in the tales, according to Bettelheim, appeal to the tendency to polarization on the part of the immature ego, which cannot yet tolerate the mixed and ambiguous nature of real mothers and of reality generally. Dragons, giants, and demons also correspond to aspects of the child’s inner life—anxieties, hatreds, sadistic fantasies. In these frightening creatures, the child meets and conquers “the monster he feels or fears himself to be, and which also sometimes persecutes him” (p. 120).

One of Bettelheim’s most sustained analyses is of “Briar Rose,” the Sleeping Beauty story; which he reads as an account of adolescence and sexual maturation. In this story a king, having been told by an evil fairy that his daughter will prick her finger on a spindle and die, tries to avert the curse by banishing all spinning from the castle. Yet inevitably, at the age of fifteen, the princess manages to find a spindle, pricks her finger, and begins to bleed, inheriting the prophesied “curse” of menstruation. She falls into an enchanted sleep—the narcissistic trance of adolescence—protected against premature sexual encounters by a thorny hedge, until wakened to mature sexual love by the prince’s kiss.

Zipes, who attacks Bettelheim’s interpretations on the grounds that they ignore historical and social contexts, reads the Sleeping Beauty story very differently, as “a bourgeois myth about the proper way males save . . . comatose women” (The Brothers Grimm, p. 152). The charge of sexual stereotyping in the tales, however, does not concern Bettelheim: “Even when a girl is depicted as turning inward . . . and a boy aggressively dealing with the external world, these two together symbolize the two ways in which one has to gain selfhood: through learning to understand and master the inner as well as the outer world” (p. 226). Bettelheim believes that children are able to relate a story to their own experience regardless of the main character’s sex.

Bettelheim explores the psychological richness of the tales in fascinating detail, opening up endless possibilities of understanding and interpretation. But he does tend to idealize them, emphasizing their beauty and their healing properties. In a detailed analysis of “Cinderella,” for example, he argues that the tale deals with the hidden sexual and aggressive tensions within the family and finally resolves them in a positive way: “ ‘Cinderella’ sets forth the steps in personality development required to reach self-fulfillment, and presents them in fairy-tale fashion so that every person can understand what is required of him to become a full human being” (p. 275).

There are, however, other related but less beautiful tales dealing with the relationship between a widowed father and his daughter, such as “The Handless Maiden” and “Allerleirauh” (“Many Furs”), which Bettelheim does not analyze, perhaps because they do not present such positive developments, at least not very convincingly. These stories are less famous than “Cinderella,” and for good reason. In “Allerleirauh” the widowed king wants to marry his daughter, who runs away, disguising herself as a kitchen maid. In “The Handless Maiden,” the king asks his daughter to let him chop off her hands in order to save himself from the Evil One, suggesting powerful evil desires that can be thwarted only by mutilation; the daughter submits and then flees her father.

In both of these fascinating stories, the father—like King Lear, whose story originates in a related legend—demands an excessive and unnatural love from his daughter.