A Study on the Childhood Maturity Process in the Fairy Tale of Limped Deer through Bruno Bethlehem's Perspective

Psychoanalysts and psychologists of different schools have analyzed fairy tales for psychoanalytic purposes. Bruno Bettelheim, a Freudian thinker, seeks to show how fairy tales, using imaginary faces, shape the process of healthy human development and make the process of development interesting and acceptable for the child. The Limped Deer tale helps children figuratively to learn how to manage the two conflicting feelings of love and hatred toward their parents and to preserve the image of the loving parents. In the story, when children leave home, it means that self-care and individualism require leaving home. Running away from the demon is a symbol of the child's conceptualization of the dangers of adolescence as imaginatively disturbing creatures. Siblings are symbols of the need to assimilate conflicting human and animal tendencies within themselves to achieve real development. The whale swallowing the sister represents an unreal death to reach a higher existence. "Replacement", "adjustment and modernization of deep psychological conflicts", "individuality and identity independence", "psychological extraversion", "personality integration", "mental, psychological and social order", "the cultivation of the imagination" are all the most important functions which are extracted from the Limped Deer. Therefore, it is concluded that fairy tales can address the fundamental problems of the child's maturity process figuratively and resolve them in an imaginative and indirect way.