In turning Maleficent into a feminist morality play, Disney subverts the nature of fairy tales and suppresses any sense of magic and moral logic. For the child—and the adult who knows there is still a child in all of us—fairy tales reveal truths about ourselves and the world. As psychologist Bruno Bettelheim stated in his Read more
In 2011, American child psychologist Jennifer Hartstein published an advice book for parents wishing to rid their female children of so-called “princess syndrome,” her name for the inevitable insecurities and superficial obsessions that little girls allegedly develop when they are exposed to an abundance of girly-girl commercial culture, particularly in the form of Disney princesses. Read more