Top 35 Bruno Bettelheim Quotes
#1. 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.
Bruno Bettelheim
#2. The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue ...
Bruno Bettelheim
#3. Whoever influences the child's life ought to try to give him a positive view of himself and of his world. The child's future happiness and his ability to cope with life and relate to others will depend on it.
Bruno Bettelheim
#4. From a child's play, we can gain understanding of how he sees and construes the world
what he would like it to be, what his concerns are, what problems are besetting him.
Bruno Bettelheim
#5. A child ... who has learned from fairy stories to believe that what at first seemed a repulsive, threatening figure can magically change into a most helpful friend is ready to believe that a strange child whom he meets and fears may also be changed from a menace into a desirable companion.
Bruno Bettelheim
#6. Television captures the mind but does not liberate it. A good book at once stimulates and frees the mind.
Bruno Bettelheim
#7. Since there are thousands of fairy tales, one may safely guess that there are probably equal numbers where the courage and determination of females rescue males, and vice versa.
Bruno Bettelheim
#8. What redeems us as human beings and restores us to our humanity is solicitude for those whom we love.
Bruno Bettelheim
#9. 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, in line with his natural endowment and as the consequence of his unique life in history.
Bruno Bettelheim
#10. Play reaches the habits most needed for intellectual growth.
Bruno Bettelheim
#11. To be a good enough parent one must be able to feel secure in one's parenthood, and one's relation to one's child ... The security of the parent about being a parent will eventually become the source of the child's feeling secure about himself.
Bruno Bettelheim
#12. When a world goes to pieces, when inhumanity reigns supreme, man cannot go on with business as usual.
Bruno Bettelheim
#13. The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one's life.
Bruno Bettelheim
#14. Play permits the child to resolve in symbolic form unsolved problems of the past and to cope directly or symbolically with present concerns. It is also his most significant tool for preparing himself for the future and its tasks.
Bruno Bettelheim
#15. 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.
Bruno Bettelheim
#16. 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.
Bruno Bettelheim
#17. The child, so much more insecure than an adult, needs assurance that his need to engage in fantasy, or his inability to stop doing so, is not a deficiency.
Bruno Bettelheim
#18. Even Aristotle, master of pure reason, said: 'The friend of wisdom is also a friend of myth.
Bruno Bettelheim
#19. He disappears, and her endless wanderings in search of him take her to the moon, the sun, and the wind.
Bruno Bettelheim
#20. Most advice on child-rearing is sought in the hope that it will confirm our prior convictions. If the parent had wished to proceedin a certain way but was made insecure by opposing opinions of neighbors, friends, or relatives, then it gives him great comfort to find his ideas seconded by an expert.
Bruno Bettelheim
#21. What children learn from punishment is that might makes right. When they are old and strong enough, they will try to get their ownback; thus many children punish their parents by acting in ways distressing to them.
Bruno Bettelheim
#22. 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.
Bruno Bettelheim
#23. 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.
Bruno Bettelheim
#24. Among the most valuable but least appreciated experiences parenthood can provide are the opportunities it offers for exploring, reliving, and resolving one's own childhood problems in the context of one's relation to one's child.
Bruno Bettelheim
#25. Raising children is a creative endeavor, an art rather than a science.
Bruno Bettelheim
#26. 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.
Bruno Bettelheim
#27. All my life, I have been working with children whose lives were destroyed because their mothers hated them.
1981 re: cause of autism
Bruno Bettelheim
#28. The delight we experience when we allow ourselves to respond to a fairy tale, the enchantment we feel, comes not from the psychological meaning of the tale (although this contributes to it) but from its literary qualities-the tale itself as a work of art,
Bruno Bettelheim
#29. But had Minkowski and Einstein not recognized it long before us, our schizophrenic children would have taught us that space-time is a unity that precedes any separate understanding of either category; just as grasping this unity is a precondition for understanding causality.
Bruno Bettelheim
#30. What cannot be talked about cannot be put to rest. And if it is not, the wounds will fester from generation to generation.
Bruno Bettelheim
#31. You cannot have sex education without saying that sex is natural and that most people find it pleasurable.
Bruno Bettelheim
#32. Only in adulthood can any intelligent understanding of the meaning of one's existence in this world be gained from one's experiences in it.
Bruno Bettelheim
#33. The unrealistic nature of these tales (which narrowminded rationalists object to) is an important device, because it makes obvious that the fairy tales' concern is not useful information about the external world, but the inner process taking place in an individual.
Bruno Bettelheim
#35. Punishment may make us obey the orders we are given, but at best it will only teach an obedience to authority, not a self-control which enhances our self-respect.
Bruno Bettelheim
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