Fairy Tales and Fear: On How Children Learn to Contain What They Cannot Understand

At one of his lectures, Giuseppe Civitarese made an interesting remark. We tell children stories about witches and poisoned apples not in order to frighten them, but to help them process the kinds of experiences they inevitably encounter in real life.

This idea may seem simple, yet it carries far greater depth. A fairy tale is not merely a story. It is a way of working through experience, a form of mentalisation, a transition from nameless terror to something that can be endured and thought about.

In psychoanalytic terms, the fairy tale performs a containing function. From the very beginning of life, the child encounters experiences that are frightening and not immediately understandable. Things happen for which there is no explanation: parents quarrel, a mother suddenly shifts from being kind and patient to angry and irritable, siblings behave in troubling or aggressive ways, and so on.

Such experiences are too raw, and the child does not yet possess the means to process them. Here, the fairy tale becomes essential. When a child hears a story about a witch, an evil sorcerer, or dangers lurking along the way, they are offered an image, a form into which their fear can be placed.

The point is not that evil exists within the tale. What matters is that it becomes part of a narrative and is transformed. In almost every fairy tale, when faced with fear, the protagonist endures it, passes through trials, confronts an adversary whose chances of victory seem overwhelming, and ultimately finds a way through.

In this way, when encountering frightening reality — for example, a parental conflict — the child no longer feels entirely helpless. An internal reference begins to form, allowing them to manage what they see and hear. It is as though the child can say to themselves: “This is like that story… it was frightening there too… but it can be survived.”

Bruno Bettelheim wrote about this in his book The Uses of Enchantment. He emphasised that fairy tales open up possibilities of imagination that the child cannot reach on their own. Melanie Klein, in turn, insisted that the child’s inner world is, from the outset, filled with aggression, fears, and fantasies of destruction. Fairy tales give these fantasies a form.

Bettelheim observed that many parents wish to protect their child from recognising that the source of difficulties lies within ourselves — in other words, in the inherent human tendency towards aggressive, antisocial, and selfish impulses under the influence of anger and anxiety.

Instead, parents prefer to believe, and to encourage the child to believe, that “all people are good by nature.” Yet the child knows that this is not entirely true. They experience anger, envy, and even the wish to harm. If these experiences do not find a form, the child may begin to feel “bad,” or even monstrous.

The fairy tale makes it possible to endure this.

For this reason, we read frightening stories to children not despite our care for them, but precisely because of it. Reality will, in any case, prove frightening. What matters is that the child has a means of responding to it.

In this sense, the fairy tale may be understood as the earliest form of psychoanalysis. In both cases, the same process is at stake: the capacity to encounter what is difficult to bear without being overwhelmed by it or forced to turn away.