Psychoanalysis: What Everyone Knows and Has Heard Repeatedly

Bruno Bettelheim—barring the historical criticism provided by Robert Darnton on the grounds of inappropriate source material—falls into the same trap that all other psychoanalytic thinkers fall into—attribution of privileged position to the psychoanalyst as interpreter. The unreliability of any analysis—in that the subjectivity of that analysis makes it nearly impossible for two similarly trained, similarly skilled psychoanalysts to independently reach the same interpretation—reduces even the most minute of possibility for any meaning to be generated and grasped from such an exercise to a puddle of mush. Since there can be, in the psychoanalytic method, no verification nor reproducibility, the entire system collapses in on itself and loses any significance that it ever could have had. Although, to some extent, it is true that psychoanalysts tend to agree on certain aspects of interpretation, this is more an artifact of the blatant structure that they have subscribed to than to any actual similarity of interpretation, since they have been equipped with very limited symbols that they are meant to arbitrarily distribute (id, ego, & superego and anal, oral, phallic, & one more which I cannot recall off hand and is unimportant-enough not to warrant the extra 27 keystrokes it would take to look it up on Wikipedia) upon the objects, subjects, and actions of the story, and this overt structure has very little correlation to the actual interpretation of the story. All other aspects of the psychoanalytic method tend to be little more than the attempt to link every action and symbol to some object of sexuality and in turn reduce the entire field of psychology to little more than a game played by middle school children wherein they attempt to make any thought or word or symbol "dirty" as a leisure form of bemusement and humor.

Now that I have said what everyone already knew, I will move on to a more interesting and informative topic: "The Struggle for Meaning".

Bettelheim starts rightly by presenting his background, biases, and project, but that is about the extent to which his article is praiseworthy. His extremely unique experience, similar to that of Freud, in working with "severely disturbed children", to at least a slight extent, negates his ability to prescribe to the general case because "severely disturbed children" would clearly be an exceptional case, from which the common case could not be extracted. This is another important systemic problem of psychoanalysis in general: although there is some small group of applicable cases the attempt to generalize those cases in order to apply them to the average or common case. This distorts the system by analyzing the extraordinary as ordinary and deteriorating the application as a comprehensive project.

His primary flaw in argumentation, however, is that he evokes two primary and contradictory ends as the internal motivation for children to read: immediate and future gain, both of which, he inaccurately assesses. For immediate gain, he posits that the experience of reading is only enjoyable in a situation such that the material is both interesting and entertaining, an assertion that is far less than likely on account of two major factors: that parents, teachers, and other mentors to children offer direct positive reinforcement of the behaviors in means of attention and praise and that children create for themselves a form of intrinsic motivation that trumps—both positively and negatively—the perceived gain of entertainment. Here it should be noted that much of the content of children's literature has changed since the writing of his essay and that integral to the genre at that time were works as those that were meant to didactically instruct on the proper exercise of hygiene or deportment, making the need for his argument much less in the modern context anyhow. But still, his argument is rather weak on point, or else children would never have learned to read or literacy rates would have been so significantly waning that teaching children to read in such a setting would seem a futile and impossible effort. Let it not be mistaken, however, that I here support and defend the use of tedious texts or meaningless dribble as children's reading materials. I, above all, am an avid proponent of presenting children with meaning and purpose as well as imaginative exercises, even to the extent that I endorse the creation of literature for children that is equally worth-while for adults and nourishes the mind through an analysis of philosophy or thoughtful deconstruction of social values. These maxims are, however, in no way necessary—a conclusion reached with great relief, for they are quite rare in nature (and allow me to clearly state that fairy tales rarely meet the standards I have just outlined unless they tend from the recent movements that satirize, reassess, and recreate them in hopes of presenting some important aspect of society in a new light and deconstructing the form of fairy tales—a much more difficult genre to adapt to "child-appropriate" themes).

Fairy tales, in their attempt to moralize the world and stories, are also, far less than helpful to children. As he correctly asserts, the children will start to assume the moral code presented by the tales, but at what cost? The morality presented by the Grimm's tales is so far outdated and backwards as to be appalling—and can unilaterally be blamed for the sexual anxiety in the Modern era that Freud and many others rightly noted though wrongly assessed. The tales demonize women if they are not beautiful, which tends to be the highest value they are judged by and the source of all good qualities in women of the tales. It also sets marriage (subjugation) as the highest and most sacred obligation and achievement a woman can attain. These along with other values presented in the Grimm's tales reduce the self worth and esteem of children who, in finding the disparity between the good presented in fairy tales and themselves can only justify the discontinuity by blaming themselves. Herein lies the source of modern self esteem issues that are only fed further by the industries of media that overload youths with the images of "beauty" that are linked to a rare body type that few can possess, no matter how hard they strive to attain it (short of surgical procedures), but these magazines and movies cannot hold the sole blame because the destructive value had to be put in place prior to the essentialization of the form of beauty endorsed by the society.

The only point on content where he has hit the mark is that parents need to refrain from sugar-coating the world and presenting only happy ending stories. There is great value in children learning to comprehend tragedy and imperfection—that the good guy sometimes loses and sometimes no one wins. In this insipid world, there is no right or wrong, no hero or villain, no joy or pain, and children need to be allowed to see the truth once in a while…

I know that you are all so glad to have such a long-winded dissertation on the topic… No need to thank me?