The Uses of Disenchantment

By Walton Stanley
August 16, 2022

As someone who works with stories, folktales, fairy tales, and myths, and as a person with a sense of the mythic in literature and popular culture, I find that people are often awed by episodes of magic, of super-natural powers or events in these stories. We are in awe of magic powers or super strength from the feats of Heracles to the power of “the force” evident in Luke Skywalker.  Audiences are consistently fascinated by episodes of “enchantment”

In 1944 a holocaust refugee named Bruno Bettelheim was given a professorship in Psychology and became the director of a therapeutic school for emotionally disturbed children at the University of Chicago.

Bettelheim went on to write an award-winning book titled The Uses of Enchantment that explored the use of fairy and folk tales to enable children to work out psychological issues, fears, and traumas through story. However, it seems the real use of enchantment was that of Bettelheim passing himself off as a psychologist and passing the book off as his original work. The American public was enchanted by him, book critics were enchanted, and the University of Chicago was enchanted.

The dis-enchanted truth was that Bettelheim held a degree in Art History and had virtually no formal training in psychology. His book, The Uses of Enchantment, was largely plagiarized, and it was later revealed that Bettelheim was abusive, physically, emotionally, and in at least one instance sexually, of the children who were his charges at the school.

We tend to think that great stories have the power to enchant. There is a great deal of focus on magical events and powers in such stories be they fairy and folk tales, science fiction, drama, or some other genre. Great stories, however, are consistently about the act of disenchantment.

Stories always revolve around a problem that sets their events in motion. This problem is almost always some kind of collective, personal, or cultural myopia, or a mass delusion. The world of these stories has somehow fallen under an enchantment and the job of the story is to disenchant the world so that life can again be abundant, lasting, just, and joyful. The story is the unfolding of the process of dis-enchantment, of awakening, of the exposing of a heretofore, invisible delusion.

In Wolfram Von Eschenbach’s telling of Parsifal, the abundance and blessing of the Grail can only be unleashed when someone breaks the enchantment of the Grail Castle by asking the seemingly simple question: “What ails thee uncle?”

In the works of Shakespeare, worldly realms stand in for the human psyche and fester under the enchantment of illegitimate rulers. For example, in Hamlet, the central problem is that a King has died leaving a perfectly capable, well-educated, thirty-year-old crown prince, but everyone in the kingdom is under the enchantment that the rightful king is the late king’s brother and not the prince. Similarly, in The Tempest the rightful Duke, Prospero has been overthrown by his brother Antonio.

The wrong king is a strong motif in British folktales such as the Maginogi. The question is one of the soul and not a political one: Is one’s soul the “king” of their life, or will the life be lived by a pretender; a persona? Two branches of the Mabinogi, an old Welsh story cycle, deal with the descendants of a king named Lyr (Branwen Daughter of Lyr and Manawydan Son of Lyr). The issue of rightful kingship is central in these stories. Shakespeare picks up the Lyr (Lear) name in his tragedy which involves a King Lear giving his kingdom to daughters and sons-in-law who flatter his ego rather than to his true and truthful daughter Cordelia. Of Shakespeare’s 39 plays, 15 deal significantly with the issue of an illegitimate. unworthy, or false king or executive (e.g., Duke, Prince, or other ruler) being in place, or with a crown in contention.

Why should we care about the power struggles of ancient kingdoms and what difference does it make to us today? In the political sense: none, but in the metaphorical sense, having the wrong king in place is an acceptance of the defeat of our own soul and the thwarting of our individual destinies. Our psychic kingdoms lie under an enchantment.

It is a condition of life that human beings are separated from their destinies. The traumas we endure, be they physical or social bullying, abuse, violation, violence, poverty, degradation, classism, sexism, racism, oppression based on gender or sexuality, or simply making our way fitting into human society, cause us to put up defenses of one kind or another. These defenses take the form of personas; adopted roles that an individual takes up to try to find safety. The role may be one of dominance (e.g., the tough guy, the jock, the popular girl, the bully), or one of submission (the shy person, the bookworm, the nerd),they may feature expansive energy (extroversion) or a contraction (introversion), but no matter which persona is chosen, it is a disguise and (at least initially) a form of protection or a “body-double” for the soul. The soul, however, must eventually assume the throne of our lives by deposing the personae. The process of deposing personae and the ascension of the soul to power in the psyche is initiation.

Indigenous societies tend to have cultural techniques to cook off these personas and reconnect the soul of the individual with its purpose in this life and with its unique gifts to the community. While we are familiar with adolescent rites of passage, it is the case that initiations are not a once-in-a-lifetime event.

Like the thousands of reincarnations and the accumulation of karma in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, personae are frequently being reborn. To keep the soul in power, people must go through many initiations throughout their lives. They may also be initiated into medicine societies that complement the soul-gifts they carry. As indigenous peoples carry knowledge in the oral tradition, stories are the recipes of these initiations. Stories are images and metaphors set as mnemonic devices for the rites or process of disenchantment and for the liberation of the human soul.

While great stories provide a recipe for the re-animation and liberation of the human soul, simply hearing a great story will not break the enchantment (just as reading a recipe will not satisfy a hunger).

By engaging with the images, and asking what they mean for us, finding our place in the story, we begin to see steps that may be taken to break calcified paradigms and stubborn delusions. The soul starts to engage with the metaphors and images in the story and through this engagement, becomes activated, awakened, and restless.

Story is spoken in a soul language and questions for the soul arise in the telling of a story:

“Have I given away my gold?”

“Did I pick up the gold feather of the firebird? “

“Am I under the earth in a place of ashes?”

“Am I riding a shaggy pony?”

These questions are in the metaphorical language that engages and awakens soul. The same questions can be asked in the clinical language of psychotherapy (“Have I failed to take responsibility for my own happiness?” Have I taken on a challenge?” “Am I depressed?”), but such non-poetic, non-metaphorical, language tends to engage our reason rather than our soul. When reason is engaged, we tend to cycle into rationalizations (that is inventing “reasons” for the situation).

In engaging the image, carrying out the prescribed action designated in the metaphor, we can discern a ritual path to follow, and we know that, rather than being pathological, our condition is a step along a well-worn path toward freedom and wholeness.

By staying with the image in the story, we can then proceed to acknowledge our place in the story and to ritualize it. Because we know, from the story, what the next stage is going to be, we can then ritualize the story and, when appropriate, mark our passage to a new phase of the story.

Enchantments Under Which We Live Today

We have been discussing the personal form of enchantment that involves the manifestation of personas, but, beyond such individual enchantments, whole cultures can fall under an enchantment. When stories and their images are not sufficiently worked through; when a story becomes an unconscious paradigm, the curtain of enchantment can fall over a culture.

What form does the enchantment take? Whether or not we hold Abrahamic religious beliefs, there is an ubiquitous underlying belief that stems from the Genesis story of a time of innocence and of paradise that we have lost and will, one day, regain through progress, or, if we fail to progress sufficiently, our species will be exterminated as a punishment for our wickedness.

You will hear echoes of this unconscious paradigm from hard core rationalist atheists, from environmentalists (among whom the purification of the Earth through the extinction of humans is a weirdly popular notion), from religious and non-religious progressives, from political and Christian conservatives, from Silicon Valley techno-visionaries, and from others, all laboring under the same unexamined story: the myth of progress, perfectibility, and a return to a lost paradise.  

Arising from the lost paradise and progress paradigm is the idea that humans are separate from the other beings on the planet and that our species stands at the apex of evolution. As superior beings, the world is a trial we must navigate the goal being to overcome biological death in some way and to attain a god-like immortality.

Immortality is the core of our enchantment. There are numerous tactics to attain it. One tactic is to invest in an “afterlife.” This is typically an eternal paradise, and its shadow side is a realm of eternal darkness, and torment. Some traditions have established waiting rooms as well in which beings reside until their destination is sorted out. The afterlife overcomes the mortality problem to some extent in that it grants us all a kind of congenital immortality, so that while we will die in this world, we will simply step into another. In so doing, we will no longer need our animal body and will live in eternal bliss.

A second tactic involves using technology to extend life indefinitely. We can see this story in current notions such as the “singularity” a state in which humans and human consciousness becomes integrated with machines and will thus no longer be subject to the biological frailty of our animal bodies. Again, we will no longer need our animal body and will live in eternal bliss.

An intermediate tactic is to amass wealth, resources that, in theory, make us invulnerable to the whims of “nature.” While securing a plentiful food supply is a natural impulse for animals, humans have gone well beyond any reasonable level of resource hoarding. The accumulated wealth of an average billionaire could provide a sufficient living to that person for 10s, or even 100s of thousands of years. Given that billionaires are not immortal and have normal human lifespans, amassing this level of wealth and the personal hoarding of such mass quantities of resources can only be seen as a disease.

Overall, these are all variations on the myth of paradise and progress toward regaining it. The idea being that we humans belong in an Eden in which we need do no work and enjoy eternal pleasures. Through “progress,” we will eventually regain this paradise. Another variation on this myth is that of Armageddon. In this version, most people are wiped out through war, famine, disease, or a combination of all three. Of course, a select contingent of humanity will either survive (and bring about paradise), or, in some versions, this select group is transported to eternal bliss while the rest of humanity is obliterated. Armageddon or apocalypse is simply a violent and elitist version of the progress to paradise idea.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the image of an Eden or lost paradise. It is probably a mythic recapitulation of the wholeness we might (f we are fortunate) experience as infants in which all our needs are provided for and nothing is expected of us. We have (if we are lucky) a sense of belonging, of oneness, of being unconditionally loved and provided for. However, when adult human beings attempt to bend all of creation to their own comfort and to enslave and exploit all around them in an unconscious effort to gain God-like immortality and personal salvation (i.e., the perpetuation of one’s persona, one’s unchecked ego), then the lost paradise myth forms the basis of a dangerous entitlement.

Let us imagine for a moment, a different story; a paradigm in which humans are one species of animal in a complex community of life. Imagine that, for the sake of the community of life to continue, humans must fill a particular set of functions within the community.

Biologists can describe for us the impact of non-human life forms. They can tell us the function of woodpeckers in maintaining forest health. They can explain how beavers impact their environments. They are even coming to understand the networks of fungi that support forests and grasslands and the interdependencies of various plants, bacteria, animals, and fungi have formed.

However, what role do humans play in this scenario? We have told ourselves that we somehow sit outside of it. Indeed, even environmentalists see our species as a kind of universal parasite without a role in any ecosystem except that of despoiler.

In truth, there is no pristine wilderness untouched by humankind. This is the old fantasy of Eden (just another enchantment). Humans have become well-established throughout the planet. Our ecological niche is not (as some would have us believe) that of parasite and destroyer, quite the opposite. When humans function within our niche in an ecosystem (that is functioning in the way people had done for about 250 million years, or until about 5,000 years ago and as indigenous peoples did, and in some cases, do function today), humans create a more complex, more diverse, more resilient environment wherever they go.

Humans have an uncanny ability to move about, to adapt to an enormous variety of climates, altitudes, aridity and rainfall extremes, and biomes.

Humans are the animal that messes about with the world. We move through all land and seascapes on the planet. We conduct prescribed burns. We encourage a wide variety of food species and not just for ourselves, but we also enrich our environments for other animals and for other plants. Biologists and anthropologists are discovering, over and over in widely disparate locations, that what was thought of by colonizers as miraculously abundant “virgin land” was the product of millennia of indigenous interaction and husbandry. Blinded by the Eden myth, colonizers failed to see the efficiency and abundance of indigenous relationship with the land and seas and set about deforesting, plowing, leveling, draining, damming, and creating a sham Eden through one narrow form of agriculture and later (to further escape the physical realm and the burden of labor that monocrop, invasive farming entails) turned to mechanization.

The result of failing to take up our species’ role in our environment, to live under the enchantments of human exceptionalism, of endless progress, of a quest for immortality, are becoming dangerously clear.

In the current episode of our story, there is trouble in the land. Life is becoming less abundant, injustice reigns, and false kings have seized the seats of power. Our world has fallen under an enchantment. Let us begin the hard work of disenchantment through the power of the stories we tell and a careful examination of the images that hold us in their thrall. If we are unaware of the myth in which we are living, the myth will live our lives for us.