Literature is the Soul of the World

PSYCHOANALYSIS IN FAIRY TALES

Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990) discusses in his book "Psychoanalysis of fairy tales" the influence of fairy tales on children education.

Bruno Bettelheim

Fairy tales while entertaining the child, helps you understand and encourages the development of his personality, gives meanings to different levels and enriches the child's existence.

Fairy tales play the role of allies to maintain the positive aspects of life through laughter, tears and unexpected ends. They stimulate the imagination that nurtures our children by making the story a personal experience and participate in the construction of essential matters of life and death, desire, bans, violent feelings and contradictions.

Applying the psychoanalytic model of human personality, the stories provide important messages of conscious, preconscious and unconscious. When referring to universal human issues, these stories speak to the little self in training and encourage their development while simultaneously releasing the preconscious and unconscious of their drives. As the stories are deciphering, body conscious, give credit to the drives of the id and show the different ways of satisfying them according to the demands of the ego and the superego.

One of the messages transmitted by fairy tales to children is that struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence. Although, if one does not flee but facing unexpected hardship and often unfair comes to dominate all obstacles, as in the story of "Hansel and Gretel". The child has to stop being subjected to pressures to act on it with itself. The student has to learn to trust that, in future, he will be able to overcome the dangers of the world, even more terrible than his fears can imagine. At the end, he will be enriched with the victory as Hansel and Gretel.

Fairy tales has also other features that can help the child to resolve oedipal conflicts. Mothers cannot accept the wishes of the children to eliminate dad and marry mom. However, learners can participate as winner of the fantasy dragon and owner of the beautiful princess. Similarly, a mother may stimulate the fantasies of his daughter as Prince Charming and to believe in a happy end despite of the current disillusionment. With fairy tales, both boys and girls, who are in the oedipal period, can get the best of two worlds: on the one hand, they will enjoy the satisfactions from oedipal fantasies and, moreover, maintain good relations with both parents in reality. During the oedipal period, the child must bring order to the chaos of his inner life through references in the world. The story of “The queen bee” leads us to recognize that we have to give each element the corresponding demand. Consequently, the proper behavior always leads positive things.

As we grow, we learn to prioritize reason over emotion as in the tale of "The Fisherman and the Genie". Story based on a captive genius who feels the desire to benefit one who released but as time passes, increasing his anger and his desire to benefit becomes revenge. For this reason, educator do not only have the protector faced but also the educational, where the child is not always agree. We will try to instill in our children that is not good to take impulsive decisions.

In conclusion, Fairy tales staged, in symbolic form, the way to grow. This will be aided by a construction, unique in its kind, where everything is connected, where the sequences are chained to better manage the disorder and dominte feelings.

Children explore the world by oberving and manipulating. As they investigate the nature and parameters of language, poetry may give them contact to specific elements not found in their everyday experience. Poetry allows readers to perceive objects, experiences or emotions in a new and unique way. Pupils are natural poets because poetic language comes naturally to everybody, and give us the ability to capture the essence of life experience.

Children poetry has given increasingly relevance in the last years. As far back as human documents go, there was little genuine children poetry written before Dr. Isaac Watts published his Divine and Moral Songs for Children in 1715. Poems have advanced from Watts’ religious poems to children’s feelings themes, worked for instance by Louis Stevenson. New developments in poetry suggest that children understand more themselves and they often express themselves more thoughtfully when writing poetry. Moreover, rhymes are important for language, cognitive and physical development.

Dr. Isaac Watts and Louis Stevenson

Working on language development, poetry helps students to learn new words. It appears effortless, by cause of the stanzas structure, but it provides a familiar context to unfamiliar words. Furthermore reading rhymes aloud helps pupils practice pitch, voice inflection and volume, which deals with the physical development. Breath coordination, tongue and mouth movements, are made easier by the musical component of the rhyme. Reading poems benefits on the understanding of when you need to breath, and for how long.

On one hand, linguistic intelligence is still worked on cognitive development. Students understand that there are words which are similar in sound but different meanings. They learn what a pattern is, and became capable of recognizing patterns. On the other hand, emotional intelligence is a dimension that we particularly need to take care about. Poetry promotes empathy as a means to reinforce and deeper emotional literacy. Also, reading poems written by others offers a way for children to make connections and associations with the author’s work. It allows them to connect with the author’s emotions and understand they are not the only ones who are feeling such emotions.

INSPIRING STUDENTS

Myra Cohn Livingston (1976) suggest an approach that expedites children’s discovery of their own poetic voice:

1. Share with pupils many poems that will stimulate their imagination.

2. Give them observation sheets on which they can record their own responses, guided by the questions “what I saw” and “what I thought about what I saw”. These sheets create a bridge between the facts observed and the feelings related to the observations.

Mayra recommends prompting pupils to consider sounds, smells, and tastes in their surroundings by bringing in potato chips and other noisy food.

PROMOTING EMOTIONAL LITERACY

1. Discuss with children a variety of emotions and what they mean to each person.

2. Children read a poem based on an emotion.

3. Discuss the simils in the poem.

4. Children write their own poem using an emotion they choose.

5. Display the children’s work.

TWO – VOICE POEM

1. Discuss how people can see the same event from different points of view.

2. Ask children to work in pairs each taking one point of view of a situation.

3. Together the children can write a two-voice poem.

4. Ask each pair to read the poem aloud in two voices.