Bettelheim

Hey Guys! I figured I'd just put my introduction and post all in one to make things easy. My name is Kayla Careccia and I am a senior Psychology major. In the future I hope to become a therapist specializing in couples and family therapy. I have to admit that I am not much of a blogger, and I'm not sure how amazing my insights will be, but I will try!

I was a little biased towards liking the Bettelheim article because of my interest in psychology, but I definitely found some things problematic with the article. I am glad that Bettelheim mentioned that "nothing is more important than the impact of parents and others who take care of the child" in regards to whether the children end up becoming 'severely disturbed'. The second most important factor in preventing this is apparently the child's cultural heritage. While most of his article relates more to how fairy tales teach children about their cultural heritage, I was glad to see that he prefaced it by recognizing that the primary factor in regards to a child's mental state is how they are raised.

I agree with Bettelheim when he states "the child needs...to be given the chance to understand himself in this complex world with whcih he must learn to cope." It certainly does sound useful for a child to be read a fairy tale such as Hansel and Gretel and be able to try and think of what he or she would do in that situation. It is definitely beneficial for children to be made aware of possible dangerous situations so that they can figure out the best course of action before they ever are put into one. We must be wary, however, in the content within the fairy tales we tell them because there is a line between telling the children a story to help them figure out who they are and mentally scarring them.

I am a little confused on what he means by making the distinction that severely disturbed children are clearly lacking a sense of meaning in their lives. He obviously deduced that this was the one thing all of his patients lacked, but the article never quite made it clear to me how reading fairy tales helped to give children this meaning they lacked. Overall this was an interesting article, there are just a few points I wished Bettelheim had explained a little better.