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The Uses Of Enchantment By Bruno Bettelheim Summary

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Fairy tales are a big part of our childhood, they are the first window to real life. In the excerpt “The Uses of Enchantment” by Bruno Bettelheim, he points out all the benefits fairy tales posses and their significance to our development. He argues that classical fairy tales in contrast to modern stories have more of the “existential anxieties and dilemmas” of life kids need to familiarize in order to have the ability to understand and have a “satisfying independent” life. Undoubtedly, modern fairy tales sanitize every unpleasant aspect of the story and leave the story as a complete fantasy leaving out any realistic aspiration. Consequently, leaving kids thinking life is an easy open road without any significant bumps. Meanwhile, classical fairy tales deal with dilemmas like morality, death, evil and love. …show more content…

Yet we are giving our kids a disturbed version of the real world we make them think life is easy and at the end we all live “happily ever after.” A big contribution to this is the stories we read to our kids, stories that have been designed to be the soothes and comforting for our children. An example of how we are purifying fairy tales is Disney stories, they make the old classical stories the cleanest possible leaving out important details and making the struggles the characters go through very unrealistic and unable to relate

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