Why Bettelheim?: A Comment on the Use of Psychological Theories in Criticism

Abstract

Why Bettelheim?A Comment on the Use of Psychological Theories in Criticism Michael Steig (bio) As an erstwhile psychoanalytic critic, I am increasingly skeptical about the uncritical use of psychological grids in literary interpretation. Bruno Bettelheim's Uses of Enchantment in particular often seems to be taken as Truth rather than as the views of one psychiatrist holding one set of values. Accepting Bettelheim's basic model of the use of fairy tales by children to externalize and (in fantasy) resolve their unconscious conflicts and anxieties is one thing—though even that model can be questioned; accepting his moralizing tendencies is something else. Thus, although I find "Unlocked by Love" a very insightful discussion of the particular appeal of four of William Steig's picture books with child protagonists, I must express some concern about the way in which Bettelheim is used. Arlene Wilner's suggestion that William Steig's Sylvester is transformed into a rock as a punishment seems to derive from Bettelheimian assumptions about misconduct and justice in stories for children. Or does she assume that all calamities in children's stories are viewed by child readers as punishments? In either case, we are distanced from the experience of reading when the critic fails to describe her own relation to either the theory or the interpretation. There is nothing new in the unquestioning acceptance and application [End Page 125] of psychological precepts: literary critics have been doing it for years, whether the source of undisputed wisdom is Freud, Jung, Bettelheim, or Lacan. (A recent example: Michael Reed's piece in the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 11, on the female Oedipus complex in Outside Over There—an interesting article that nonetheless gives no sense of the author's basis for accepting Freud's theories.) The special problem with Bettelheim (also true of Freud to an extent) is that his supposedly scientific view of child development is fraught with values that can be called political and moralistic, a fixed set of ideas about how children should develop. "Unlocked by Love" does communicate some sense of the author's feelings about the appeal of the stories by William Steig, and no doubt Bettelheim's basic model was a necessary starting point for the article. But this critic and all too many others keep the works they interpret at a distance by choosing to apply "well-accepted" views of child development without considering that any theory of a universal pattern of development is open to serious doubts—if only by the fact that it claims universality. What I am suggesting is that the criticism of children's literature needs greater awareness both of the possible weaknesses in particular psychological theories and of the processes of reading and interpretation. [End Page 126] Michael Steig Michael Steig teaches at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Dickens and Phiz (1978) and Stories of Reading: Subjectivity and Literary Understanding (1989). Copyright © 1990 The Children's Literature Foundation, Inc.