Handicaps of Childhood

by H. Addington Bruce

Let me hasten to add that this does not mean that the fairy tale should be entirely banished from the literature of childhood. It means only that parents should exercise more discrimination than they usually show in selecting fairy tales for their children. The rightly chosen fairy tale is indeed an almost indispensable aid in the early education of children, for reasons that are admirably summarised by an American educator, Mr. Percival Chubb, in these words:

"One value in fairy stories for the young is that they embody and commemorate the man-child's first rude assertion of the lordship of mind, and subserve the development of a later sense of spiritual freedom and autonomy. Another is that they are expressive, as all art is expressive, of the idealistic hunger at the heart of men. Again, as forms of art, they select and co-ordinate those facts which bring out the spiritual meanings of life. That is, they release from the unsifted materials of experience the imprisoned 'Soul of Fact.' And not only do they embody the basic moral insights and interpretations of childish man, but they express the simple and larger emotions, and so feed the heart of the child. They quicken, too, the imagination—that master-faculty without which the sympathy which is man's highest and richest endowment fails of fruition. They are an aid to culture by giving an outlook upon all nations and kindreds, all countries and conditions of life. Finally, along with their allied forms of literary invention, the myth, saga, fable, and so on, they are a condition to understanding the innumerable allusions with which the literature of the world is studded."[15]

All this is assuredly the function of the fairy tale, but frequently it is frustrated by the kind of fairy tales children are allowed to read. For one thing, the imaginative faculty is scarcely stimulated in a healthy fashion when the mind is led to dwell constantly, as in the case of Doctor Brill's patient, on thoughts of cruelty and pain. Nor can the fairy tale be said to have exerted a healthy influence in such a case as that represented by a little girl who was brought for treatment to another medical psychologist, and whose morbid irritability, disobedience, and crying spells were, by psychological analysis, traced to an excessive jealousy of her brother. In the course of the analysis the discovery was made that the girl had frequent dreams of seeing both her mother and her brother cruelly treated. In one dream, witches shut her mother in a cave to starve to death, and threw her brother into a large caldron of boiling water, leaving her to perish miserably.

"This dream," the little girl naïvely explained to the physician who was analysing her mental states, "is just like the fairy tales I read."

Other dreams of cruelty were likewise found to be drawn from the reading of unpleasant fairy tales. So that, although in this case jealousy was undoubtedly the chief cause of the nervous condition for which treatment was required, fairy tales also played a part in directing the course of the little girl's morbid thinking and her difficult behaviour. Warned by this revelation of the dream-analysis, her physician made it a point to notify her mother that unless steps were taken to change the girl's reading matter she might develop traits of character—harshness, coldness, indifference to the sufferings of others—that would handicap her throughout life.

Or, instead of causing an abnormal harshness, the fairy tale abounding in gory elements may breed an equally abnormal timidity, passing sometimes beyond the category of a character defect to that of positive disease. A typical instance is found in the experience of a young New York boy.

"Our son," his parents told the physician, to whom they took him for treatment, "has suddenly become excitable and nervous, afraid to go outdoors alone, and still more afraid to sleep alone. If left to himself after having been put to bed, he often wakes out of a sound sleep, shrieking for us. When we go to him he seems dazed, and for some moments does not recognise us. But he cannot tell us what has frightened him, and in the morning does not remember his alarm."

From this brief description the physician at once recognised that he had to deal with a case of what is technically known as pavor nocturnus, but better known to the lay public as "night terrors." Having had a thorough training in medical psychology, he was well aware that night terrors are grounded in disturbing experiences of the waking life. Accordingly, he questioned the parents closely.

Insistently they denied that anything had occurred to cause their son undue anxiety or alarm. Then the physician resorted to psychological analysis of the boy's mental states and, before long, made the discovery that his mind was full of frightful images of giants, wizards, and slimy monsters. Promptly he summoned the father and mother to a conference, and asked them:

"Have you been reading or telling fairy stories to your boy lately?"