ABSTRACT
Fairy tales are wonderfully evocative stories that have shaped the fantasy world of generations of children in western Europe. Beginning in seventeenth-century France, folk tales were collected, rewritten, and transformed into literature by the likes of Perrault and Grimm. Many of them were quickly adapted for children (for example, by Marie Catherine, Comtesse d'Aulnoy, 1650-1705; and Arthur Rackham), and others, such as Hans Christian Andersen's tales, were written for children. Now fairy tales are read assiduously to quite young children. Bettleheim (1997), Heuscher (1963), Luthi (1970), and others claim that fairy tales provide children with explanations of the human behavior they observe and experience. These stories give children an externalized image of their feelings stage by stage as they mature.
