Andersen's fairy tales have recently "gotten into trouble" .
On March 24, netizen @輕成一飛燕 said on Weibo that she never told her daughter about the "classic fairy tale" of "The Daughter of the Sea".
Fairy tales written by men are really completely illogical. Just for a man who has only seen one eye, need to exchange the resources of his sisters (beautiful long hair), the castration of the self (inability to speak) and the price of lifelong pain (walking upright like a knife) for a so-called "love"? As a cleric with superpowers in a mermaid group (female group), would a sea witch come up with such a plan that has no rationality or feasibility, dwarfing the female species of the sea and kneeling to lick human males?
At the same time, she also rejects all the prince and princess fairy tales that are happy ending, believing that they are not suitable for girls. Girls can not only be young, beautiful, soft and deceitful, nor can they only have the end of marrying a prince.
This is not the first time Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales have been attacked. Previously, some people criticized the story of "The Ugly Duckling" for "three views are not correct" and promoted the "theory of descent": the ugly duckling can become a white swan not because of its efforts, but because it is originally a swan egg. Others believe that Andersen wrote such stories because as the son of a shoemaker, he always fantasized about whether he could have a better background. Andersen's fairy tales are unhealthy "poisonous weeds" in their eyes, projecting Andersen's own strong inferiority in the face of high society.
For this interpretation, there are many voices against it -
The scope of the Sanguan police is getting wider and wider. Please don't interpret Hans Christian Andersen with snobbish eyes, you're just looking for fault.
In fact, Andersen's critics and defenders look at fairy tales on different scales. Fairy tale is a narrative text with a simple plot, so there is a lot of room for interpretation, you can stand in a very realistic perspective, use feminist theory to evaluate it, you can also transcend reality, with truth, goodness and beauty and other more essential dimensions to analyze it. Disagreements are normal, but people are more concerned about whether the autonomy of reading and not reading, the autonomy of interpretation, is in their own hands.
So this brings up the difficult question of whether parents have the right to decide whether their children want to read Andersen's fairy tales according to their own preferences. Should we give our children the opportunity to read, and how to interpret them, so that he can choose them with his own experience in the future? Perhaps before thinking about this, we need to know how children perceive fairy tales.
Therefore, we have re-pushed the old article originally published in the Beijing News Book Review Weekly on October 24, 2015: "East of the Sun, West of the Moon: Fairy Tales Never Lie". Fairy tales are not written in everyday language, and children do not understand fairy tales with adult logic. When a child sees a character in a fairy tale who is either good or bad, will he only form a black-and-white opposing view of right and wrong? When the child sees the end of the prince and princess together, will the girl just want to wait for the prince to save her? For these questions, fairy tale psychology research, gives its answers.
Fairy tales never lie
Fairy tales make the path of fictional interlacing between the stars, making everything in nature have a deeper meaning. To transform the poetic language of fairy tales into the bland and monotonous language of psychoanalysis is a luxury adventure, and in the worst case we may even lose the fairy tale itself, after all, all good things, fragile in the face of pragmatic rationality.
But psychologists who specialize in the inner plight of man have to shoulder the task of such an adventure, bidding farewell to the beauty constructed by language and turning to the search for the idea and secret of the human heart.
People who are honest with themselves will admit that there are many thoughts and desires in their hearts, which are with us day and night, real but not easy to grasp. Many of them are defined as "bad" things by our culture, by our civilization, and just by telling them, it is shameful, anxious, or disturbing. Human civilization has discarded many things on its way to progress, especially those more primitive impulses and desires. Born free, but in the shackles of all directions, it is said that the discipline of civilization and the freedom of life constitute the cross.
But discarded and repressed inner truths never fade away, and they inadvertently pop up in demand of recognition and understanding. An important task of growing up is to accept the complete self and to be able to live in peace with all of one's own thoughts. We have a decent and dignified self and are happy to accept a self that is the complete opposite of this image. Without successful completion of this task, various psychological disorders will appear, and in our place we will speak of such failures.
In the most benign way, fairy tales pick up the facts that have been sent into darkness by civilization and provide room for them to grow. In fairy tales, fragments of the human spirit and human destiny tell the joys and sorrows that have been repeated many times in history. Every fairy tale is a gift of love, and when encountered with people, it can be a magical mirror that reflects certain aspects of our inner world and the path we must take from naivety to maturity.
Fairy tales can be a whole world, from which people can find their own turbulent currents and waves rolling in the depths of their hearts, discover the depth and subtlety of the emotional world, understand how to obtain inner peace, and how to behave in the world.
The poet Schiller said: "Deeper meaning is contained in the fairy tales I heard as a child, not in the truth that life has given me." Fairy tales never happened in ancient times in distant places, they correspond to the truth of our hearts. East of the sun and west of the moon, fairy tales never lie.
Fairy tale six questions
01 Why
Fairy tales always happened a long, long time ago
Fairy tales unfold in symbolic language, not in everyday language of reality.
The first story of Grimm's Fairy Tales, the Frog Prince, opens like this: In ancient times, when wishes could still be realized, there was a king whose daughters were very beautiful, but the youngest daughter was so beautiful that the well-informed sun was amazed at her beauty every time it shone on her face.
This opening identifies the story in a unique fairy tale time, in ancient times when people looked at the world with animistic ideas, believing that the sun was watching people and reacting to the things of the world. This timeline is actually in the spiritual world of man. In the first years of life, children also believe that there is animism and that the whole world will respond to their wishes.
Therefore, the "long, long time ago" in fairy tales actually takes readers away from the real world around them and into the inner world of the spirit, which looks very distant and ancient, but is the closest to the inner world of people.
"Fairy Tale Psychology" by Hayato Kawai, Translator: Zhao Zhongming, Edition: Nanhai Publishing Company, May 2015
02Why the characters in fairy tales are always either good or bad
In all those creation myths owned by mankind, the original world was chaotic, and after complex transmutation, each was classified into its own category, each kept its own time, and with order, civilization could develop. The same is true for human growth.
Children feel the world in a holistic way, and in the initial state of the mind, they are chaotic, mixed with emotions and experiences, and the development of personality, like the development of civilization, needs to be based on an order.
If all the child's delusional fantasies are manifested in a good fairy; all destructive desires are manifested in an evil witch; all fear is manifested in a greedy old wolf; all the demands of conscience are manifested in a wise man encountered on an adventure; and all jealous anger is manifested in some animal that pecks at the eyes of his chief rival—then he will be able to sort out the contradictory tendencies within him. Once this situation begins, children will not be thrown into chaos and unable to extricate themselves.
The Charm of Fairy Tales: The Psychological Meaning and Value of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim, Translator: Shu Wei / Ding Suping / Fan Gaoyue, Edition: Social Sciences Literature Press, July 2015
03 Fairy tales have so many secrets
Do parents need to explain all this to their children?
The child's eventual experiences and reactions are subconscious, both before he reaches a more mature age and awareness. For the sake of the healthy growth of the child, it is very important for him to feel that his parents are unaware before deciding to reveal his inner thoughts.
If the child knows that the parent can perceive the child's secret thoughts, know his most hidden emotions, and even before the child himself begins to realize them, then the parental control will be extremely destructive.
We grow and discover meaning in life and our own sense of security by understanding and solving problems that individuals encounter on their own, rather than by explaining them to us through others.
Fairy tales create miracles in children's hearts, and the premise is that children feel through repeated listening and thinking about the content of the story, and rely on themselves to understand and successfully cope with difficulties. You know, the truth is always cold, understand a lot of truths can not live this life, the real nourishment of people is the inner experience, fairy tales can provide, is the experience.
04 In Little Red Riding Hood
What is the significance of Grandma being replaced by an old wolf
We might think that this terrible metamorphosis is unnecessary because it is so far removed from reality. However, the reality in children's lives is completely different from the reality in adult life.
Judging by the way children experience things, the old wolf lying on grandma's bed may be even more terrifying than the grandmother who scolds her whenever she pees her pants. For a child, the grandmothers become a terrible character in the blink of an eye, a person who is so kind, who often brings gifts, and who is even more tolerant, more tolerant and more unprovocative than the mother, suddenly acts in a completely different and judgmental way.
Divide the image of the grandmother in two, and the children will be able to retain the beautiful and kind image of the grandmother in their hearts. If grandma becomes an old wolf, it is indeed terrible, but with the old wolf, the children do not have to let the benevolent image of the grandmother suffer, and the loving grandmother will eventually return.
05
"From then on, the prince and princess lived happily ever after" is it used to deceive people?
People who lack knowledge of fairy tales will think that such an ending is boring and mediocre, and it is a kind of unrealistic desire to satisfy. But in fact, such stories convey a very important message to children.
"From then on, they lived happily", yes, you read that right, this ending is not deceiving in the slightest, it shows unmistakably that building a truly satisfying relationship that is closely connected to the life partner can eliminate the pain we feel because of the finiteness of life.
Fairy tales tell people, but when a person does this, he reaches the pinnacle of the emotional security and the enduring relationship that a person needs to survive, and this alone dispels the fear of death. It also tells people that if a person finds a truly mature love, there is no need for him to desire eternal life. "From then on, they lived happily and happily for a long, long time."
06
Whether children should
Avoid the dark stories of fairy tales
One-sided spiritual food can only one-sidedly nourish the soul, and real life is not all full of sunshine.
Dominant cultures tend to assume that the dark side of man does not exist, and vigorously promote an optimistic theory of goodness. When it comes to their children's education, parents will think that it is necessary to avoid the things that bother him the most, the invisible, inexplicable worries and chaotic, angry, and even violent fantasies.
However, those who are rejected will actively seek out the children and ask for the recognition they deserve. There is a widespread refusal to acknowledge the inherent dark side of human nature, and children are forced to think that many of life's mistakes are rooted in their own nature: out of "my" anger and worry, indulgence and doing whatever they want, selfishness. If they don't understand that these things are actually the tendencies that all human beings have, then children will become monsters in their own eyes, they will hate themselves, and in extreme cases, they will be crushed by this monster.
Fairy tales are precisely to implicitly tell children that others also harbor the same desires and fantasies of committing evil. If the children are not exposed to these stories, he must admit that he is the only one imagining such things, which makes his fantasies truly terrible. Knowing that others share the same or similar fantasies as we do, we feel that we are part of humanity, thus alleviating our fear that we think that it is the intolerable people of the world who have such destructive and evil thoughts.
Author: Zhu Guiying Editors: Rong Xiaosong, Xu Xueqin
Introduction Proofreading: Xue Jingning, the introduction was added by the editor