The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales

The author, Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990) was born in Vienna, Austria, where he worked in his family’s lumber business until 1938, when the Nazis invaded Austria and placed him in a concentration camp at Dachau, Germany because he was Jewish. On being released in 1939, he moved to the United States. He embarked on his interest in psychology when he became a research associate with the Progressive Education Association at the University of Chicago. By 1944, he had become an associate professor of psychology there, as well as the head of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School, where he worked with children with autism. He was interested in applying psychoanalytic principles to the troubles the children faced, and he published on the topic in books titled Love is Not Enough (1950) and Truants from Life (1954). Bettelheim became a public intellectual, even appearing on the Dick Cavett show in 1979; however, there was a shadow side to his personality. Other scholars, including Jack Zipes, claimed that Bettelheim fabricated his credentials and that much of his work, including that for The Uses of Enchantment (1976), was plagiarized. There were also rumors that he physically abused some of the children under his care at the Sonia Shankman school.