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BLOODY MARY IN THE MIRROR: ESSAYS IN PSYCHOANALYTIC FOLKLORISTICS. By Alan Dundes. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2002, 141 pp.
Folklore includes myths, legends, customs, tales, songs, proverbs, jokes, curses, charms, games, superstitions, and rituals. Folkloristics, as Alan Dundes defines it in his slender volume Bloody Mary in the Mirror: Essays in Psychoanalytic Folkloristics, is "the academic study of folklore" (p. 55). When folkloristics is combined with psychoanalytic analysis, insight, and thinking, psychoanalytic folkloristics (the term Dundes proposes here for his discipline) makes for extremely revealing and illuminating thinking and reading.
Dundes, a professor or anthropology and folklore at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of numerous books (both academic and popular) on various aspects of folklore, has turned his perceptive, methodical, and acute attentions here to analyzing and interpreting a diverse group of seven folk tales, games, and rituals. These consist of an attempt to understand the psychological logic of ritual fasting and self-mutilation as a way of summoning the gods; a view of the pervasive vampire myth and its meaning; a fairly straightforward analysis of the ancient Egyptian "Tale of Two Brothers"; a look at the symbolic meaning of a game known in Greece as Long Donkey, and in the United States as Johnny on the Pony or Buck Buck; an examination of the Bloody Mary ritual, legend, and game for early adolescent and preadolescent girls; a decidedly disgusting but hilarious look at male fraternity initiation and hazing rituals; and a long and often very funny analysis of the Disney animated film The Little Mermaid, as "a male construction of an Electra fantasy." Two of the essays in the collection ("The Trident and the Fork," and "The Elephant Walk and Other Amazing Hazing") were coauthored by Dundes' daughter, Lauren Dundes, professor of sociology at Western Maryland College.
In his preface Dundes contends that
inasmuch as a large portion of folklore consists of fantasy material, it would seem obvious that the meaning(s) of such material cannot possible be elucidated without recourse to some form of psychology. If we grant this, then the question arises as to what form of psychology should be employed. My own bias is that psychoanalysis provides the tools necessary for the illumination of folklore (p. ix.).
Not...