Quotes from Bruno Bettelheim

Television captures the mind but does not liberate it. A good book at once stimulates and frees the mind.

The question for the child is not Do I want to be good? but Whom do I want to be like?

If we hope to live not just from moment to moment, but in true consciousness of our existence, then our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives.

The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue.

You can't teach children to be good. The best you can do for your child is to live a good life yourself. What a parent knows and believes, the child will lean on.

No longer can we be satisfied with a life where the heart has its reasons which reason cannot know. Our hearts must know the world of reason, and reason must be guided by an informed heart.

Not only is our love for our children sometimes tinged with annoyance, discouragement, and disappointment, the same is true for the love our children feel for us.

Play reaches the habits most needed for intellectual growth.

If I were a first grader in one of the suburban schools, I would conclude that schools are geared toward two important things: lining up for lunch and putting the chairs on the desks at the end of the school day. These are the only two things that every teacher I observed adamantly insisted on. The child can only conclude that these tasks -- and not reading -- are terribly important. Everything else in the classroom is more or less laissez-faire.

When a world goes to pieces, when inhumanity reigns supreme, man cannot go on with business as usual. One then has to radically reevaluate all of what one has done, believed in, stood for.

To have found meaning in life is thus the only certain antidote to the deliberate seeking of death. But at the same time, in a strange dialectical way, it is death that endows life with its deepest, most unique meaning.

Fairy tales are loved by the child not because the imagery he finds in them conforms to what goes on within him, but because--despite all the angry, anxious thoughts in his mind to which the fairy tale gives body and specific content--these stories always result in a happy outcome, which the child cannot imagine on his own.

Visit any public school toilet and look at the graffiti. You'll see that when children are interested, they can learn to spell quite complicated words.

Although we like to think of young children's lives as free of troubles, they are in fact filled with disappointment and frustration. Children wish for so much, but can arrange so little of their own lives, which are so often dominated by adults without sympathy for the children's priorities. That is why children have a much greater need for daydreams than adults do. And because their lives have been relatively limited they have a greater need for material from which to form daydreams.

All education is based on a middle-class morality that finds its psychoanalytic equivalent in a powerfully developed reality principle which insists that one must largely forego present pleasure for greater gains in the future. The trouble is that this, too, is not learned on a rational basis, but through anxiety instilled by the parents and by their example. If parents do not live by a stringent morality and by the reality principle, neither will their children.

The parent must not give in to his desire to try to create the child he would like to have, but rather help the child to develop--in his own good time--to the fullest, into what he wishes to be and can be.

I am very much in favor of fairy tales. Anxiety-provoking things happen, serious things happen, still there is a happy ending. But you don't have to use fairy tales. Let's have a serious story about the Puritans, one that goes beyond turkeys and Thanksgiving. Why not talk about the fact that the Puritans were so rigid the Dutch couldn't stand them and kicked them out? Speak about how undesirable rigity can be and the need for tolerance.

As the creative adult needs to toy with ideas, the child, to form his ideas, needs toys--and plenty of leisure and scope to play with them as he likes, and not just the way adults think proper. This is why he must be given this freedom for his play to be successful and truly serve him well.

Raising children is a creative endeavor, an art rather than a science.

This is exactly the message that fairy tales get across to the child in manifold form: that a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence -- but that if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious.

No longer can we be satisfied with a life where the heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know. Our hearts must know the world of reason, and reason must be guided by an informed heart.

The wish for a new life is predicated on the hope that one can have a better one, and the despair that such a better life cannot be grafted onto the present one.

The most extreme agony is to feel that one has been utterly forsaken.

The fear of failure is so great, it is no wonder that the desire to do right by one's children has led to a whole library of books offering advice on how to raise them.