- in which the mind wanders into, even before the intrepid foot has left behind its step.
While looking for something to go along with this photo, I found an interesting book by Bruno Bettelhiem, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. Below is
a small excerpt.
"This is exactly the message that fairy tales get across to the child in manifold form: that a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence – but if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious.”
Bettelheim himself, an Austrian Jew, had some experience of unexpected and unjust hardship in the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald. As an eminent child psychologist after World War II, he observed the sort of attention that children paid to fairy tales; in particular, he noted that children often ask for the same story again and again with real urgency while they are struggling with new concepts. He proposed that the stories help children understand the mystifying experience of life in symbolic terms.
