Meseterápia: Mesék a gyógyításban és a mindennapokban

by Ildikó Boldizsár, and: Mesepszichológia: Az érzelmi

intelligencia fejlesztése gyermekkorban by Annamária
Kádár (review)

Anna Kérchy

Marvels & Tales, Volume 28, Number 1, 2014, pp. 199-203 (Review)

Published by Wayne State University Press

For additional information about this article

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 Reviews

an ironic moralist. Indeed, these pages are the most extensive yet in Perrault
criticism on the narrative structure and function of the versed morals, giving
particular attention to the use of irony. Also revealing is the analysis of meta-
enunciation in Perrault’s tales, the reference to their own enunciation.
Through an engaging analysis of the use of the pronoun on, Adam shows how
the boundary between narrator, characters, and readers is dissolved, creating
a common point of reference marked by irony toward the worlds of the fairy
tale. At its best, then, this second part of the book refines and fleshes out
conclusions made by other scholars, albeit from the standpoint of genetic and
discursive analysis.
In their joint conclusion Adam and Heidmann point to the need for the
study of other fairy-tale collections with the comparative philological,
genetic, and textual linguistic analysis used in this book. The pair have
already published studies of Andersen, the Grimms, and Angela Carter, and
they promise future work in this vein. In North America and perhaps else-
where, the methodology endorsed by the authors is not widespread, to say
the least. And yet their book demonstrates that scholars of fairy tales have
much to learn from this approach, even if they do not adopt it for them-
selves. We should all greet future work by Adam and Heidmann with great
interest and hope that they will dialogue more directly with other method-
ological approaches.
Lewis C. Seifert
Brown University

Meseterápia: Mesék a gyógyításban és a mindennapokban. By Ildikó Boldizsár.

Budapest: Magvető Könykiadó, 2010. 368 pp.
Mesepszichológia: Az érzelmi intelligencia fejlesztése gyermekkorban.
By Annamária Kádár. Budapest: Kulcslyuk Kiadó, 2012. 376 pp.
Leading Hungarian folklore scholar Ildikó Boldizsár is nationally renowned
as the editor of best-selling fairy-tale anthologies about men for women and
about women for men (2007); about mothers and about fathers (2008); and
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about life, death, and rebirth (2009). In her 2010 publication, Meseterápia:
Mesék a gyógyításban és a mindennapokban (Fairy-Tale Therapy: Tales to Help
Cure and Everydays), she claims to have developed a bibliotherapeutic method,
called metamorphosis fairy-tale therapy (metamorfózis meseterápiás módszer,
abbreviated MMM), by relying on ancient folk wisdom encapsulated in the
enduring form of the fairy tale, a genre that has not only served entertainment
and informational purposes but also primarily provided a ritualistic means for
intergenerationally passing down a complex body of mundane and metaphysi-
cal knowledge about the fundamental psychic needs and conflict resolution
capacities of the “enworlded” human being.
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In Boldizsár’s view the major leitmotifs and plotlines of folktales and fairy
tales fictionalize real-life existential dilemmas by tackling questions such as
how to find one’s true bride, how to fight the seven-headed dragon, where to
locate the Water of Life, and what is beyond the Glass Mountains. They help us
to appease struggles, settle imbalances, and “mend the time-out-of-joint,” not
so much by promising to correct the malfunctioning of the world but rather by
revealing potential tactics to harmonically relate to and make the most of the
limited possibilities granted by our internal and external realities. The táltos
magical winged horse—the mythical helping figure in Hungarian folktales that,
once adequately ridden, “flies as swift as thought” and that traditionally serves a
shamanistic means of meditation—spectacularly emblematizes the tales’ invita-
tion to self-reflectivity both on the cognitive and the spiritual level.
Although Boldizsár’s fairy-tale therapy is allegedly based on empirical
evidence gained from healing storytelling sessions she gave at children’s hospi-
tals, her interdisciplinary method—combining folklore, philosophy, psychology,
history, aesthetics, literary theory, and religious studies—is applicable to all age
groups for psychotherapeutic, regenerative, and preventive purposes alike.
However, MMM is most widely used in Hungary today as training in self-
awareness and crisis management, helping people in their 20s through their
50s resolve anxieties and deal with an impasse temporarily surfacing or chroni-
cally prevailing in their lives as a result of common depressing or traumatic
experiences: loss, mourning, solitude, communicational difficulties, problems
in intimate interpersonal relationships (separation anxiety, divorce, unrequited
love, abandonment, emotional addiction, rivalry), or any other form of distress
constitutive of our contemporary cultural malaise.
First, the patient chooses the tale that she believes to bear the most resem-
blance to her own current life stage and self-image. Second, through a detailed
and collaborative analysis of the tale, the patient is encouraged to take part in
active fantasy work and explore how the story symbolically stages her own
troubles and thoughts. The ritualistic, affectively charged identification with
the heroic protagonist enables the patient to revitalize fossilized, suppressed
sense perceptions and emotional channels, to reestablish lost contacts with
inner and outer realms. Eventually, in the third stage of the therapy, the patient
retells the tale changing some of its motifs to model her own road to (self-)
healing. The new version, with personalized solutions of her own, will regen-
erate her life and allow for satisfactory access to “the totality of being.” Fairy
tales tailored to individual needs are endowed with the capacity to provide
consolation and encouragement, to ease psychic and physical pains, and to
enable us to understand and rebalance our lives by letting us come to terms
with our own desires, constraints, possibilities, and the spiritual roots that
provide the ground for our shared system of universal human values.
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The first Fairy-Tale Therapy Center, founded in a little Hungarian village

called Paloznak in 2010, the year the book on MMM was published, adopts a
line from Goethe for its credo: “There are two things children can get from
their parents: roots and wings.” However, the point is that the stable value
system and the self-fulfillment symbolized by roots and wings should be
rendered available to everyone, regardless of origin, education, quality of life,
or family background, simply by virtue of the gift of fairy tales.
The most recently published Hungarian scholarly work on the therapeutic
value of tales, Mesepszichológia: Az érzelmi intelligencia fejlesztése gyermekkorban
(Fairy-Tale Psychology: Developing Children’s Emotional Intelligence) (2012)
by Annamária Kádár, pays homage to MMM by quoting Boldizsár’s argument
concerning how the relation to wonder fundamentally determines the quality
of human existence: the question is not that of belief or disbelief but rather of
a capacity to make use of enchantment to better one’s life. The book also recy-
cles the earlier-mentioned metaphorical imagery of roots and wings, regarding
them as symbolic tokens of children’s development of an inner sense of
emotional security, psychic integrity, imaginative willingness, and an inalien-
able primary trust in the goodness of being, which makes the effort to reach
one’s goals seem worthwhile, the failures seem more bearable, and happiness
seem more accessible. Kádár claims that this is the main message of fairy tales,
fabulously encapsulated in Hungarian children’s poet Sándor Weöres’s line
“The earth is beneath us, the sky is above, but the ladder is always within” and
suggesting that every child should be offered the chance to gain empowerment
through identifying with the little swineherd who climbed atop the tree reach-
ing up into the sky and beyond, pointing toward limitless possibilities.
Kádár’s work is indebted to MMM—along with a number of other theo-
retical takes on fairy-tale therapy from Carl Jung, Bruno Bettelheim, and Jean
Piaget to Verena Kast, Marie Louise Von Franz, and Laura Simms—which she
intriguingly yet accessibly refers to in her study. But because Kádár is primarily
a child psychologist, an expert in kindergarten and elementary school peda-
gogy, and a trainer in emotional intelligence developmental programs, her
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perspective on the beneficial, curative potentials of tales is slightly different.

Whereas most of Boldizsár’s case studies report how tales can function by
means of a retrospectively compensatory cure for frustrated or traumatized
adults embarking on a self-help project, Kádár concentrates on calling parents’
and teachers’ attention to how storytelling can help the early development of
emotional intelligence and serve as long-lasting spiritual support, preventing
the emergence of future psychiatric disorders.
Quite pragmatically, Kádár suggests that any successful life career depends
just as much on cognitive capacities and reasonable decisions (IQ) as on an
intelligent use of emotions (EQ), both of which help to reach a harmoniously
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satisfying self-esteem, to connect and cooperate with others in autonomous

yet empathic ways, and to resolve conflicts, reach compromises, and define
and realize desires. The special cozy atmosphere of the bedtime storytelling
ritual allows children to reach a nearly trancelike relaxed state whereby
daytime tensions can be released, frustratingly nonverbalized aggression can
be projected on negative characters, instinctive and rational impulses can be
harmonized, fear can be reinterpreted as an emotion concomitant with the
activation of inner powers, and the painful loss of the comfort zone is disclosed
as a prerequisite for further development.
Kádár excitingly argues that “living in a fairy-tale world” and “believing in
miracles” for a person with a highly developed emotional intelligence signifies
neither some sort of loony escapism nor a resenting, phlegmatically passive
awaiting for the grilled dove to fly into one’s mouth already roasted, as the
Hungarian proverb says. Neither does it require an uncompromising pursuit
of the ready-made quest prescribed by fairy-tale plotlines. It does signify, on
the contrary, the embracing of an optimistic life philosophy grounded in the
solid value system of fairy tales, which show us that respect, solidarity, love,
endurance, honesty, and a healthy combination of sane realism and creative
fantasy can help us surmount obstacles, exploit emerging possibilities, and
reach our goals. Fairy tales teach us never to back down and never to give up,
to fight fears relentlessly, and, most important, to live serendipitously, making
pleasantly surprising, happily accidental, fortunate discoveries of agreeable
and valuable things that have not been particularly sought after.
After the careful examination of more than a thousand tales written by
Hungarian schoolchildren, Kádár singles out the most frequent infantile narra-
tive patterns of fictionalized conflict resolution and embarks on writing ten
therapeutic tales of her own, published in the appendix of her book. The
protagonist of Kádár’s therapeutic tales for children (4- to 9-year-olds) is a
little girl called Lilla, who has an imaginary friend, FairyBerry (sort of an
animated problem doll), who helps her to negotiate, express, and accept her
emotions but never instructs or disciplines her. FairyBerry never asks Lilla not
to cry and never mocks, doubts, or discredits her feelings. This fairylike tute-
lary companion is just simply present, “always there for her” to share joys and
sorrows, and yet FairyBerry is prepared to let go once the little girl seems to be
able to manage on her own. Thus FairyBerry symbolizes unconditional accep-
tance and the art of “loving with open arms,” thus serving as a model for
“good-enough” parenting, in psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s sense.
Boldizsár’s and Kádár’s works are theoretically informed scholarly books,
characterized by an erudite yet enjoyable style that is accessible to nonprofes-
sional audiences as well. They fit nicely into the traditional lineage of

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Hungarian endeavors exploring the therapeutic values of fairy tales, from

thanatologist child psychiatrist Alaine Polcz’s pioneering play diagnosis intro-
duced in the 1960s to today’s clown doctors, puppet cure, and collaborative
fantasy works performed on new media platforms.
Anna Kérchy
University of Szeged

Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights. By Marina Warner.
Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012. 560 pp.
In addition to two dozen color plates and numerous illustrations and
ornaments throughout the text, Stranger Magic includes a glossary, a list of
abbreviations, a list of stories and their various sources, fifty pages of notes, a
brief bibliography, and an index.
Marina Warner’s beautiful new book explores the effect the Arabian Nights
has had on Western thought. It aims ambitiously to “present a different
perspective on the interaction of imagination and reason, on the history of
intellectual inquiry and scientific invention in Europe,” and thus to “move
toward the reassessment of the exchanges” between East and West (20). The
arrival of the Nights, in its first translation by Antoine Galland (1704–1717), is
fraught with contradiction: it was established as a masterpiece of imagination
in the Europe of rationality and Enlightenment, was received with rapt enthu-
siasm, and yet was also dismissed for its irrationality, and the magic that
permeates its stories was both infantilized and exoticized—relegated to the
nursery or to primitive cultures—in a process that coincided with the West’s
rejection of its own tradition of magical thought.
Stranger Magic is organized into five parts, each taking up a facet of magi-
cal thought. Fifteen individual tales, clustered around the five themes and
summarized in lively detail, provide points of departure from which Warner’s
commentary sallies forth in multiple directions, weaving together in suggestive
patterns the Oriental plots and “ideas of enchantment in the book’s afterglow”
(29), in both Eastern and Western cultures, ancient and modern.
Part 1, “Solomon the Wise King,” opens, aptly, with the story “The
Fisherman and the Genie,” which brings up the question of the jinni char-
acters so important in the Nights. Warner discusses the role of the jinni both
in relation to the plot (they “introduce a dynamic of pure chance which
runs alongside the larger designs of fate,” adding “the energy of unpredict-
ability to the plots” [43]) and in terms of their preferred mode of
transportation (flying). The flying carpet, an image that epitomizes the
Nights for our Western imagination, appears in Galland’s story of “Prince
Ahmed and the Fairy Peri Banu”; although we have some reason to suspect

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