Austrian-born psychologist (1903-1990)
The mistake is that today too many believe that what ripe maturity can contain is therefore the best fare for immaturity. The mistake we still make is to hope that more and more citizens will have developed a mature morality, one they have critically tested against experience, without first having been subject as children to a stringent morality based on fear and trembling.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
Moral Education: Five Lectures
My contention is that for education to proceed children must have learned to fear something before they come to school. If it is not the once crippling fear of damnation and the woodshed, then in our more enlightened days it is at least the fear of losing parental love (or later, by proxy, the teacher's) and eventually the fear of losing self-respect.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
Moral Education: Five Lectures
But whatever gives power is also potentially dangerous. What can make others anxious is a potentially destructive power; and if it can harm others it might also destroy its owner.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
Symbolic Wounds
A more refined morality must have as its base a once rigid belief in right and wrong based on a fear of perdition that permits of no shading, of no relativity. And when I speak here of perdition, it makes no difference whether perdition amounts to damnation in hell or the loss of parental affection. If, as modern middle-class parents are often advised, affection is guaranteed to the child no matter what, there will be no fear. But neither will there be much morality.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
Moral Education: Five Lectures
Psychoanalysis teaches that all myths, including those of our beginnings and first home, have their source in the unconscious wish. Often the same myths are called on to relieve deep anxieties by suggesting that once we lived without fear or despair and may do so again. Sometimes the myth contains a kernel of truth, but out of so distant a past that we can hardly discern, behind the elaborate tales spun around them, what may once have been familiar historical events.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
Empty Fortress
The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
The Uses of Enchantment
You cannot have sex education without saying that sex is natural and that most people find it pleasurable.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
"Our Children Are Treated Like Idiots", Psychology Today, Jul. 1981
What children learn from punishment is that might makes right. When they are old and strong enough, they will try to get their own back; thus many children punish their parents by acting in ways distressing to them.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
A Good Enough Parent
Myths are useful in forming not the total personality, but only the superego. The child knows that he cannot possibly live up to the hero's virtue, or parallel his deeds; all he can be expected to do is emulate the hero to some small degree; so the child is not defeated by the discrepancy between his ideal and his own smallness.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
The Uses of Enchantment
A parent who from his own childhood experience is convinced of the value of fairy tales will have no difficulty in answering his child's questions; but an adult who thinks these tales are only a bunch of lies had better not try telling them; he won't be able to relate them in a way which would enrich the child's life.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
The Uses of Enchantment
Much depends, of course, on the nature of the male-female relationship in the society. The psychological mechanism behind the assertion that rebirth takes place in initiation may in many cases be very simple: men's desire to detract from the importance of childbearing or to cancel their own obligations to women as the source of life.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
Symbolic Wounds
The goal in raising one's child is to enable him, first, to discover who he wants to be, and then to become a person who can be satisfied with himself and his way of life. Eventually he ought to be able to do in his life whatever seems important, desirable, and worthwhile to him to do; to develop relations with other people that are constructive, satisfying, mutually enriching; and to bear up well under the stresses and hardships he will unavoidably encounter during his life.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
A Good Enough Parent
The child, so much more insecure than an adult, needs assurance that his need to engage in fantasy, or his inability to stop doing so, is not a deficiency.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
The Uses of Enchantment
The real heroes of history ... having been people like the rest of us, impress the child with his own insignificance when compared to them. Trying to be guided and inspired by an ideal that no human can fully reach is at least not defeating--but striving to duplicate the deeds of actual great persons seems hopeless to the child and creates feelings of inferiority: first, because one knows one cannot do so, and second, because one fears others might.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
The Uses of Enchantment
Whoever influences the child's life ought to try to give him a positive view of himself and of his world. The child's future happiness and his ability to cope with life and relate to others will depend on it.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
A Good Enough Parent
It is my opinion that the puberty rites of girls are more affected by men's attitude toward menstruation than by the physiological event itself. I have already suggested that men's feelings are shaped partly by women's reaction. I should like here to make the complementary point: Girls cannot help being deeply impressed by men's awe of menstruation. If an event appears taboo and uncanny to one part of the population, soon the other part begins to wonder about it, even if they at first took it for granted. Eventually it may cease to matter who first reacted with awe.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
Symbolic Wounds
Myths project an ideal personality acting on the basis of superego demands, while fairy tales depict an ego integration which allows for appropriate satisfaction of id desires. This difference accounts for the contrast between the pervasive pessimism of myths and the essential optimism of fairy tales.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
The Uses of Enchantment
Punishment may make us obey the orders we are given, but at best it will only teach an obedience to authority, not a self-control which enhances our self-respect.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
A Good Enough Parent
Sometimes the purpose of secrecy is to keep a magic power from the hands of unbelievers, or from enemies who may use it for sorcery. But in many cases it is intended to make those excluded think that initiates have superior powers.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
Symbolic Wounds
The popularity of Tolkien, of "Star Wars," of "The Empire Strikes Back" shows that young people have a tremendous need for this fantastic elevation of good against evil, where good wins out, but the battle always has to begin anew.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
The Washington Post, July 19, 1981