Bruno Battelheim's Archetype

In my opinion, Bruno Bettelheim is correct in postulating that children use stories to work through their anxieties and to help them develop. Much like Carl Jung’s archetype of the ‘Persona,’ as “an assumed role,” I believe that children adopt the traits of the characters they read or see, in order to safely explore, and understand the similar aspects of their own identities (OED). This notion is also particularly prevalent outside of fairytales in the contemporary literary culture of North American ‘YA’ (Young Adult) novels through the recently popularized idea of the ‘Mary Sue’ archetype. Specifically, this term refers to characters that exist as an author self-insert thereby, paralleling Bettelheim’s assessment of the fairytale character

as being “typical and one-dimensional rather than unique” (329). So, in the same dynamic of the fairytale character, allowing readers to integrate themselves into that role by embellishing it with their personal complexities.
This use of the fairytale (and other stories), as a kind of self-coping mechanism or ‘sandbox,’ is prevalent in Hans Christian Anderson’s The Ugly Duckling (1843).

I will admit that before lecture, I too was under the impression that this text communicated the possibility to overcome one’s station and become their “true self.” However, despite knowing that the text instead potentially just reaffirms high social status through ideas of genetics or “good breeding,” I still think that it can serve as a means of assuaging concerns over the body and building reader’s body positivity. For instance, children whose gender does not match their biological sex or the frequently rigid dichotomy of North America’s two gender system may take comfort in the Ugly Duckling learning that the form he was born into is not wrong but rather, something natural and always intended (Anderson

168).
Correspondingly, in my childhood, I too used stories to understand preferred gender traits.

As a self-proclaimed “tom-boy” who rejected stereotypically girl paraphernalia, I gravitated towards hyper-masculine characters like Sinbad, Robinhood, and Tarzan so that I could ‘play’ at being a boy. Thus, without these characters and their stories acting as a sort of psychological outlet, I possibly would have developed an anxiety of being repressed within the available binaries. But, as Bettelheim writes, through these characters, I got to choose who to be and so, control my self-expression in a developmental stage where I otherwise would have had little access to independent power

(329).
But, what do you think?