To Bettelheim, the story of “Cinderella” is rooted in sibling rivalry. He asserts that children identify with Cinderella—a dirty, house wench—due to the oedipal stage in life. According to Bettelheim, at the start of the oedipal stage, a child begins to seek to replace their same-sex parent to earn the affections of their other parent. He explains that over the course of this stage, the innocent, natural desire becomes “repressed as bad.” According to Bettelheim, “While this wish as such is repressed, guilt about it and about sexual feelings in general is not, and this makes the child feel dirty and worthless.” Bettelheim compares the Grimms’ Cinderella’s to Basile’s “Cat Cinderella”, in which a girl, Zezolla, murders her stepmother at the suggestion of her governess, and when the governess married her father and starts putting her six children above herself, Zezolla asserts herself in attending the ball. 

Bettelheim makes reference to M. R. Cox’s study of 345 variations of the “Cinderella” story from world cultures, noting Cox’s three broad categories: (1) stories that include “an ill-treated heroine, and her recognition by means of a slipper”; (2) stories that feature a father who wants to marry his daughter; and (3), “what Cox calls a ‘King Lear Judgement’: a father’s extracting from his daughter a declaration of love which he deems insufficient, so that she is therefore banished, which forces her into the ‘Cinderella’ position.” Bettelheim comments on Cinderella’s innocence in all variations but Basile’s, stating that her degradation manifests the young girl’s guilt or will for punishment for desiring her father.

Bettelheim prefers Grimms’ version of the “Cinderella” story to the French Charles Perrault’s version, asserting, “Perrault’s Cinderella is sugar-sweet and insipidly good, and she completely lacks initiative.” He praises the symbol of the hazel tree as representing the memory of Cinderella’s, mother, one that, in growing, is mutable: “It symbolizes that the memory of the idealized mother of infancy, when kept alive as an important part of one’s internal experience, can and does support us even in the worst adversity.”

Bettelheim connects the slipper of “Cinderella” to “castration anxiety”—that is, girls’ envy of boys’ penises, and boy’s anxiety at losing theirs. In one view, Bettelheim view’s the stepsisters’ cutting of their toes and heels in Grimms’ “Cinderella” to be indicative of menstruation, meaning that the stepsisters’ contrast unfavorably with the “virginal” Cinderella; one might point out that Bettelheim may mean “pre-pubescent.” Bettelheim also argues that Cinderella’s slipper is a symbol of the vagina. With this, he argues that by the prince handing over his slipper for Cinderella to “slip” her foot into, the prince expresses his acceptance of the fact that, “while all along she had a wish for a penis, she accepts that only he can satisfy it.” It is unclear whether Bettelheim sees the foot or the slipper as the vagina; perhaps, it is both.