Analysis of Iranian Fairy Tales According to Bruno Bettelheim's Approach

Bruno Bettelheim (1903/1990), Austrian psychoanalyst and psychologist, explored fairy tales in his famous work, The Uses of Enchantment. Considering Freud’s approach, in this work he analyzed fairy tales and emphasized on the important role of tales in child’s mental developments. Bettelheim’s approach in analyzing fairy tales was based on optimism, pleasure versus reality, vicarious satisfaction versus conscious recognition, externalization, transformations, unifying dual nature, bringing order into chaos, achieving integration, and achieving autonomy. There are a few works on Iranian fairy tales according to comparative-historic, anthropological, and mythic approaches while Freud or Bettelheim’s psychoanalytic approaches has almost no evident part among them. Knowing that there is a wide similarity in fairy tales’ structures, contents, elements, and characters in all over the world, give us the authority to analyze Iranian fairy tales, taking Bettelheim’s point of view and using his doctrines of psychoanalytic analysis. The major task of this research is psychoanalytic analysis of some Iranian fairy tales according to Bruno Bettelheim’s analytical approach in which analysis of characters, symbols and functions displays paradigms of Bettelheim’s approach. Psychoanalytic approach to the study of Iranian fairy tales help us to investigate each single step of child’s development, and provides several fields to study the comparative literature.