content: No one disagrees with the fact that reading fairy tales to children can teach them valuable life lessons. That is where Bettelheim should have stopped when writing this book. His ultra-Freudian persuasion leads him way off course with this work. The sexually explicit meanings he claims young children can identify in fairy tales is nothing short of ridiculous. If it were, the Brothers' Grimm and other writers of fairy tales should have been imprisoned for providing pornography to children!