Terrible Tales

Coping with fear of infanticide

Hansel and Gretel are abandoned by their father and stepmother in a forest. Snow White is pursued by an assassin sent by her stepmother, the Queen, and then by the Queen herself. Fairy tales are, in fact, full of parents and stepparents with a murderous bent toward kids. So why do children continue to read them? Manhattan Psychoanalyst Dorothy Bloch, 66, believes she knows why: the small child has an "almost built-in" fear of infanticide, which these hoary horror stories help expunge.

Bloch's view is part of her new book, So the Witch Won't Eat Me (Houghton Mifflin; $9.95). Despite its slightly frivolous title, its central idea is quite serious. After 25 years' work with some 600 patients, most of them children, she concludes that fear of infanticide is crucial in early psychological development and sometimes in later psychological problems as well. Among her patients, she points out, she "never found anyone who did not have this fear and whose lifestyle was not designed to deal with it."

According to Bloch, all children find the parental power over life and death highly threatening. Since children find it too dangerous to direct anger and terror at their parents, those emotions are displaced onto witches, goblins and other fantasy figures. Usually a temporary retreat into fantasy is enough to exorcise the child's fear. But sometimes, especially if a youngster is subjected to severe parental abuse, perhaps beatings, the child can turn to potentially damaging reveries, including ones about changes in sexual role. In effect, the child says: "Maybe Daddy would really love me if I were a boy instead of a girl," or vice versa. Unless they are resolved, explains Bloch, such conflicts may be the first step toward homosexuality.

Bloch's unconventional theories are quite likely to raise a few hobgoblins of their own among her colleagues. One reason: they run counter to a central doctrine of psychoanalysis, the Oedipus complex. In Bloch's reworking of that Freudian gospel, the kids are attracted to a parent, not out of the incestuous impulses postulated by Freud, but as a sexual strategy to gain control over a threatening parent. One needs only to return to the original Greek myth for proof of her infanticide theory, says Bloch. Unfortunately, she adds, the master apparently missed the key point: the young Oedipus himself narrowly escaped death at the hands of his father.

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