In 1990, the Austrian-born child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim was found dead, with barbiturates in his system, by asphyxiation with a plastic bag. His suicide at eighty-six years old delivered a worldwide blow to the therapeutic community, exacerbating controversy already boiling over regarding his reputation. Such scandal does not detract from the brilliance of his National Book Award-winning The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, published in 1976. I discovered it recently in the hopes of gaining better understanding of fairy tale archetypes in contemporary memoir.

(It was a lingering passage from Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 memoir Wild, her account of solo hiking the Pacific Crest Trail following the death of her mother, that got me thinking along these lines: “The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.”)

Children look to fairy tales to help them cope with life’s problems, writes Bettelheim. For as long as I can remember, I have looked to stories by and about people searching for truth, even if just through passing glimpses. The satisfaction I felt as a young girl sleuthing and solving mysteries alongside Nancy Drew, and the wonder I experienced upon feeling the stream-of-consciousness aftershocks of war through Virginia Woolf’s character Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway, both delivered to me a feeling I was seeking – one of finding something honest.

Without realizing it until I came upon the term earlier this year, I’ve been practicing a form of bibliotherapy, defined in 1966 by the Association of Hospital and Institution Libraries, then a division of the American Library Association, as “The use of selected reading materials as therapeutic adjuvants in medicine and psychiatry; also guidance in the solution of personal problems through directed reading.” When I have felt run over by a chaotic and overwhelming world, as I do in ruminating on the suicide of Bettelheim, I’ve found comfort in studying and exploring the ways in which people structure lives that seem to work. Along with readers of this site, I’m drawn to the genres of biography and memoir because true stories help me to construct a philosophy and form a meaningful frame for life.

In Bettelheim’s endlessly fascinating Enchantment, he reminds me to look beyond facts into the realm of fantasy. He draws me deep into the frame story of One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of fairy tales of Persian and Indian origin that can be traced back to the tenth century. In the tale that introduces and ends the cycle of stories, King Shahryar – who has been betrayed by his wife and is suffering from the belief that no one could truly love him – copes with this disillusionment by sleeping with a virgin each night and having her killed the following morning. Finally, the only remaining virgin in the kingdom, a young woman named Scheherazade, “insists that she wishes to become ‘the means of deliverance.’ She accomplishes this by telling each night for a thousand nights a story which so enthralls the king that he does not have her killed because he wishes to hear the story’s continuation on the following night,” Bettelheim writes. Although the king eventually declares his trust in and love for Scheherazade, and they live happily ever after, “It takes nearly three years of continued telling of fairy tales to free the king of his deep depression, to achieve his cure. It requires his attentive listening to fairy tales for a thousand nights to reintegrate his completely disintegrated personality.”

Despite their inherent violence and conflict, fairy tales possess an essential optimism. After dwelling in elements that are often, in Bettelheim's words, “too strange – as they must be in order to speak to deeply hidden emotions,” a child returns to reality strengthened by fantasies in which protagonists recover from despair, escape from danger, triumph over moral and physical threats, and find consolation in the form of justice.

While I’m still curious from a craft-of-writing standpoint about the question of fairy tale archetypes in memoir, I’m ready for a happy ending – an outcome that might require a little relief from the real. “While the fantasy is unreal, the good feelings about ourselves and our future are real, and these good feelings are what we need to sustain us,” Bettelheim writes. It’s for that kind of insight, and not his devastating end, that I will choose to remember him and all writers who have taken their own lives and illuminated ours, one story at a time.