ABSTRACT

Bruno Bettelheim was a child psychologist who had grown up in Vienna and underwent psychoanalysis there. He identified a number of ideas and dilemmas that need to be addressed as the child grows up. Bettelheim understood that folk fairy tales, that had often been part of an oral tradition for generations, had absorbed the conscious and unconscious feelings of both tellers and listeners and presented them in symbolic form. Fairy tales are often retold in very simplified form but Bettelheim recommended that they should be told in their traditional complexity so that they allowed the hearer to gain from their richness and imaginative content. One of the ways in which he promoted the development of the children attending the school was by encouraging their ability to read, because he recognized that this ability had “a unique importance in the process of education”.