I thought your post about Bruno Bettelheim was really interesting, and I was wondering if you could elaborate on something you mentioned. You said that the psychological aspect exists but doesn't explain fairytales. How do you see the psychological/psychoanalytic aspect? What is it useful for and what is it not able to do?
Wow, now that's a question I can't really answer! X)
So I am a literature student, a folklore enthusiast, a fairytale fan, and as such I am well versed in all of these things. I am not at all part of studies or intimate knowledge concerning psychology, psychanalysis or psychiatry.
That being said, what I mean by this is such... Psychanalytic and psychological analysis of fairytales do exist, can be perform and can be fun, entertaining and interesting. The same way socio-political analysis of fairytales also exist and can be fun and interesting. Just like myths or literary works, you can take one thing and analyze it under almost all the domains possible, you will always get a new meaning and a new interpretation, and discover more depths or possible continuities in the tale/myth/work/symbol. This is part of the process of survival, reuse and ultimately rewrite/adaptation of these works. Think a bit of the various theories and angles of attack one can take when it comes to analyzing a novel. Some think the work should be treated all alone in its own literary merit ; others think it should be taken as part of a greater wave or movement in the history of literature ; some voices think a book should only be judged at the light of the author's biography and personal opinions ; other rather focus on when and how the book was released, or what was the audience that received it at the time ; and even if it is just a romance novel or a children's tale or some comedy play you can always find political or esoteric or sociological meaning in them. Because that's the strength of great, famous or powerful works of art/stories - they are almost infinite wells for interpretations. A weak work is one that doesn't allow for any interesting interpretation or bizarre analysis.
That being said - it is not because a psychanalytic or psychological analysis of a fairytale can be made that it means this analysis is USEFUL in studying the tale. Due to the success of the "psycho-reading" of fairytales around the publication of Bettelheim's book, many people wrote books about the psychology or psychanalysis of fairytales. Fine. But some claimed to be able to find the "real meaning" and the "primal truth" about these tales thanks to these readings, and... that is incorrect. Fairytales are of two kinds - the oral, collected, "folkloric" fairytales, which are products of folklore, mythology and culture, and can be interpreted by thinks such as folkloric analysis, socio-historical analysis, cultural analysis, because that's what MADE these stories. On the other hand you have literary fairytales, crafted as literary works - and as such to truly understand them, one needs to perform a literary reading first, folkloric reading second. That's the reason Perrault's fairytales were so wildly misunderstood for centuries - people had replaced the literary reading of his stories with a folkloric one, which makes no sense when you know Perrault invented and rewrote many things in his tales for the sake of cultural references, puns, social critique and other wordplays. To try to claim that the "psychological" interpretation or reading of a tale allows one to get its "truth" is nonsense, because these stories and tales were not born out of an effort to perform psychological deed or be reflective of the state of one's mind or internal growth. Basile and Straparole's fairytales were grotesque farces ; Perrault and d'Aulnoy's fairytales were literary games ; the Grimm fairytales were morally-edited folktales reflecting German culture. A psychological reading can be maybe more interesting for fairytales where an author put a lot of themselves - like Andersen's fairytales. But for a lot of fairytales, psychological reading is useless for when it comes to "understanding" the "truth" of the work.
But it doesn not mean psychological reading is useless at all! The thing is that whereas this reading is dubious if not completely empty for understanding the formation, creation or "true meaning" of fairytales ; this analysis is instead massively useful and fascinating and revealing when it comes to the RECEPTION of the fairytales. An "understanding" yes, but by the AUDIENCE and this is where things gets delightful. Take Bettelheim's work and other books in the same line - it deals with how children receive fairytales, how they consciously or unconscously perceive and interpret them, how these tales resonate with their being and experiences, and how it ultimately helps them deal with things such as fears, desires, growth. This study doesn't reveal what the story is truly about in an unbiased way - unlike how many people received it - but what it is about in the head and heart of children, and that is another "face" of the fairytale that can be useful to know. But to try to take this reading as a tool to understand the creation of the fairytale is like trying to talk about the creation of a movie by basing yourself of critics' reviews rather than interviewers with the director or writers.
Psychosexual reading of fairytales can also be deeply fascinating - just to give another example outside of pedopsychology. It is well known that fairytales became the objects of not just sexual discourse, but also sexual fixations, obsessions, frustrations or reinterpretations. From a wave of erotic and libidinous fairytales that was actually part of the "golden age" of fairytales in France, to the 80s and 70s porn-fairytale movies, passing by the Italian fairytales' sex comedies, and the fin-de-siècle perversions of the fairytales, and the strange fetishes surrounding the Disney movies - fairytales have been one of the strong crystalizing points of sexuality, eroticism and fetichism. And as such, interpreting in a psychological or psychiatric way the sexual reception and interpretation of these tales is very relevant and very interesting - the focalisation around the erotic power of Cinderella's shoe, or the sexual charge of the mysterious sleep of Sleeping Beauty and her "love awakaning", and the sexual reading of cannibalistic devouring powers such as the Big Bad Wolf or ogres... There is truly something there to be dug up - but digging this means understanding what came AFTER and "with" the fairytales, and not what came before or within the fairytale.
I hope this explanation makes sense!
For example, as a final note - when I was doing my paper about ogres, I came upon a psychological interpretation of madame d'Aulnoy's fairytale "Cunning Cinders" insisting that the sisters' stay at the ogres house and them dealing with the male ogre was meant to reflect sexual abuse. And while there are definitively possible erotic jokes in this tale (the tree growing in the desert for example can be read as a slight sexual joke by madame d'Aulnoy), most of the elements brought forward by the person doing the analysis were completely wacky. Ranging from the dubious and misinformed (the nature of ogres as "sexual predatos" which is not true in French literary fairytales of the time, where ogres are parental figures and destructive parenthood - their sexual connotation only came in MUCH later literature) to the "out of nowhere". Supposedly the oven in which Cunning pushes the ogre is supposed to represent the female sexual organ? And so killing the ogre by pushing him in his own oven means she uses her sexuality to destroy him? That's a ridiculous explanation of the tale, given an oven did NOT have any sexual tones in the French culture of the time, and this was just madame d'Aulnoy reusing a very common and widespread folkloric trope illustrated by famous stories such as "Hansel and Gretel".
So yeah it is bonkers and insane. But if you take this not as an attempt to "explain the story", but as someone trying to offer a new perspective and erotic interpretation, THEN it becomes interestng especially if you take into account the way Cunning Cinders dispatches the two ogres. If we accept that the oven is to be read as a sexual organ of the female kind, then it can draw a good parallel with how Cunning uses an axe (a typically phallic symbol) to behead the ogress - female sexuality destroying the male predator, male sexuality destroying the female predator, and ultimately Cunning Cinders becoming herself an ambiguous, hermaphrodite or androgynous figure uniting both sexual symbols in herself. That could be a very cool idea for a reinterpretation of the tale. But to claim that it is the "truth" of the tale or what madame d'Aulnoy intended is to clearly be in some need to go outside touch grass, and think about how time flows, and realizing that projecting your personal ideas and your modern concepts onto a centuries-old fairytales written by someone living in an entirely different society is NOT a good way to try to "explain" it.
And that's I think the main difference between those readings. Folkloric and literary readings are their most useful when they are objective, and fail when they try to be entirely subjective or biased ; "psycho" readings are at their strongest when they are personal and intimate, and fail miserably when they try to establish themselves as objective and universal truths. At least, for the domain of fairytales.
