ABSTRACT
I examine the ways in which psychoanalysis as a genre has made use of fairy tales and how contemporary fairy-tale retellings in turn make use of psychoanalytic thought. I begin by examining the beginning of this relationship and then look at case studies of popular culture’s examples of the phenomenon, first two extraordinarily popular and influential examples of psychoanalytic theory that used fairy tales to make connections with a very broad audience, Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (1989) and Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run with the Wolves (1992), and then two examples of recent popular feminist versions of fairy tales, Disney’s Maleficent (2014) and Universal Studios’ Snow White and the Huntsman (2012).
