"EVERY ugly thing told to the child, every shock, every fright given him, will remain like minute splinters in the flesh to torture him all his life long." Thus said the famous Italian scientist, Angelo Mosso, a good many years ago. The facts of more recent research into the psychology and psychopathology of childhood, as reviewed in the preceding chapters, vindicate Professor Mosso's statement to an extent and in ways undreamed of by him. Nor is it only the emotionally disturbing things seen, heard, or experienced by children that may have a decisively adverse influence on their development. Harm may similarly and equally be done by the books and stories they[244] read, even to the extent of provoking or accentuating nervous maladies. Particularly mischievous in this respect, because of their wide reading by children, are certain fairy tales which many parents—nay, I might say, nearly all parents—consider quite suitable for young readers.
You smile incredulously at the suggestion that a fairy tale could possibly affect a child harmfully. Still more preposterous seems to you the idea that the harmful effects of fairy tales—if such harmful effects actually occur—may be carried over into adult life. But, listen:
To the Doctor Brill of the letter "k" stammering case just narrated, there once came a young man of twenty-eight, afflicted with a strange and alarming malady.
"Doctor," he said, "I want your candid opinion as to what is the matter with me. Physically I feel well, but mentally I am badly off. In fact, I fear I am insane, and dangerously so. For a long time I have been tormented by a strange desire to bite and[245] stab people and to torture them in all sorts of ways. I yearn for the times when everybody carried the dirk and dagger and could kill when offended. As yet I have restrained my mad impulse, but I am in terror lest I give way to it. Is there anything you can do to help me?"
The mere fact that he thus clearly recognised and candidly confessed his mental state was in itself a hopeful sign. But Doctor Brill was well aware that it might be extremely difficult to cure him, perhaps impossible. Everything would depend, in the first place, on whether the young man were actually insane or merely the victim of a psychoneurotic obsession. If the latter, there was a possibility of his being cured, provided the subconscious region of his mind could be explored with sufficient thoroughness to get at and root out the ideas underlying and responsible for his dangerous obsession. Satisfying himself that it actually was a case of psychoneurosis, Doctor Brill began the work of mental exploration. And, knowing that submerged ideas are pretty sure[246] to reveal themselves, directly or indirectly, through the character of a person's dreams, he began by directing the young man to make a written record of his dreaming.
"Whenever you have a dream," he told him, "I want you to write it down as soon as you awake, and bring me an account of it."
Before long, Doctor Brill was in possession of a remarkable collection of dreams, many of which, as he had expected, were of an exceedingly unpleasant character. Analysing these dreams, a curious fact at once became evident—namely, that the patient's mental life was largely occupied with imaginings that related, not to the world of everyday existence, but to the people and events of mythology and fairy tale.
Always, too, in his subconscious imaginings, ideas of death and violence were uppermost. During the dream-analysis he recalled with special vividness such themes as the beheading of Medusa, the cruelties of Bluebeard, and the freezing to death of Eva, heroine of Bryant's "Little People of the Snows." Even[247] trivial details in the settings of these and similar fairy tales were remembered and brought out in his dream-associations with a fulness that astonished the patient himself. Dr. Brill comments:
"He was very imaginative, so that the harrowing adventures enacted by fairies, genii, and Greek deities, on which he was constantly fed, were deeply interwoven with his own life, and he built up for himself a strange, archaic world. He liked to be alone, and often wandered away from his companions, to act through, in his own way, the adventures of which he had just heard or read.
"He himself traced the selection of his profession—that of an actor—to these boyish actions when he tried to imitate the fleet-footed Mercury, some character from fairyland or the "Arabian Nights," or some savage Indians. He thus imagined himself flying, and beheading monsters above the clouds, or penetrating to the centre of the earth in the form of some wicked magician, all the time passing through the most harrowing scenes. By a process of condensation,[248] he fused ancient characters and episodes with persons and actions of reality, but his fancies usually began with some god-like or demon-like myth and gradually descended to human beings.
"During the first few weeks of the analysis he was in the habit of merging into a dreamy state while reproducing associations, and often became so excited that the work had to be temporarily interrupted."[14]
It was unnecessary to seek much further for the explanation of the obsession of torture. In large part, at all events, this was quite evidently the expression in consciousness of the gruesome images with which the patient's mind had been filled by the tales told him in his childhood. Though faded from conscious remembrance, they had remained with him subconsciously, to influence for evil the current of his conscious thoughts. Or, to put the matter tersely: Had tales of cruelty and violent death not been told him in his early days, he might never have been[249] afflicted in manhood with his morbid longings to inflict pain.
Of course, if this case stood by itself it would be of no great significance. But the fact is that during the past few years—or since physicians began to appreciate the part played by childhood impressions in causing mental and nervous disease—evidence has been accumulating to indicate that the almost universal custom of telling fairy tales to children does entail grave risks to their character and their health. The child of normal nervous constitution is likely to be affected only in character; the supersensitive, neurotic child may be hurried, by the tales he hears or reads, into some more or less serious mental or nervous malady.
Let me hasten to add that this does not mean that the fairy tale should be entirely banished from the literature of childhood. It means only that parents should exercise more discrimination than they usually show in selecting fairy tales for their children. The rightly chosen fairy tale is indeed an almost indispensable[250] aid in the early education of children, for reasons that are admirably summarised by an American educator, Mr. Percival Chubb, in these words:
"One value in fairy stories for the young is that they embody and commemorate the man-child's first rude assertion of the lordship of mind, and subserve the development of a later sense of spiritual freedom and autonomy. Another is that they are expressive, as all art is expressive, of the idealistic hunger at the heart of men. Again, as forms of art, they select and co-ordinate those facts which bring out the spiritual meanings of life. That is, they release from the unsifted materials of experience the imprisoned 'Soul of Fact.' And not only do they embody the basic moral insights and interpretations of childish man, but they express the simple and larger emotions, and so feed the heart of the child. They quicken, too, the imagination—that master-faculty without which the sympathy which is man's highest and richest endowment fails of fruition.[251] They are an aid to culture by giving an outlook upon all nations and kindreds, all countries and conditions of life. Finally, along with their allied forms of literary invention, the myth, saga, fable, and so on, they are a condition to understanding the innumerable allusions with which the literature of the world is studded."[15]
All this is assuredly the function of the fairy tale, but frequently it is frustrated by the kind of fairy tales children are allowed to read. For one thing, the imaginative faculty is scarcely stimulated in a healthy fashion when the mind is led to dwell constantly, as in the case of Doctor Brill's patient, on thoughts of cruelty and pain. Nor can the fairy tale be said to have exerted a healthy influence in such a case as that represented by a little girl who was brought for treatment to another medical psychologist, and whose morbid irritability, disobedience, and crying spells were, by psychological[252] analysis, traced to an excessive jealousy of her brother. In the course of the analysis the discovery was made that the girl had frequent dreams of seeing both her mother and her brother cruelly treated. In one dream, witches shut her mother in a cave to starve to death, and threw her brother into a large caldron of boiling water, leaving her to perish miserably.
"This dream," the little girl na?vely explained to the physician who was analysing her mental states, "is just like the fairy tales I read."
Other dreams of cruelty were likewise found to be drawn from the reading of unpleasant fairy tales. So that, although in this case jealousy was undoubtedly the chief cause of the nervous condition for which treatment was required, fairy tales also played a part in directing the course of the little girl's morbid thinking and her difficult behaviour. Warned by this revelation of the dream-analysis, her physician made it a point to notify her mother that unless steps were taken to change the girl's reading[253] matter she might develop traits of character—harshness, coldness, indifference to the sufferings of others—that would handicap her throughout life.
Or, instead of causing an abnormal harshness, the fairy tale abounding in gory elements may breed an equally abnormal timidity, passing sometimes beyond the category of a character defect to that of positive disease. A typical instance is found in the experience of a young New York boy.
"Our son," his parents told the physician, to whom they took him for treatment, "has suddenly become excitable and nervous, afraid to go outdoors alone, and still more afraid to sleep alone. If left to himself after having been put to bed, he often wakes out of a sound sleep, shrieking for us. When we go to him he seems dazed, and for some moments does not recognise us. But he cannot tell us what has frightened him, and in the morning does not remember his alarm."
From this brief description the physician at once recognised that he had to deal with a case of what is[254] technically known as pavor nocturnus, but better known to the lay public as "night terrors." Having had a thorough training in medical psychology, he was well aware that night terrors are grounded in disturbing experiences of the waking life. Accordingly, he questioned the parents closely.
Insistently they denied that anything had occurred to cause their son undue anxiety or alarm. Then the physician resorted to psychological analysis of the boy's mental states and, before long, made the discovery that his mind was full of frightful images of giants, wizards, and slimy monsters. Promptly he summoned the father and mother to a conference, and asked them:
"Have you been reading or telling fairy stories to your boy lately?"
"Why, yes," the mother replied. "He is passionately fond of them, and I tell him some every day."
"And what, may I ask, are the stories that you tell to him most frequently?"
"'Jack the Giant Killer' is one. He is also particularly[255] fond of 'The Boy Who Did Not Know How to Shiver.'"
"Well, madam," said the physician, gravely, "I must ask you either to stop telling him fairy tales or to choose for him fair............