Content area
Full text
Bloody Mary in the Mirror: Essays in Psychoanalytic Folkloristics. By Alan Dundes. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. Pp. xx + 141, bibliographical references, index.)
Alan Dundes has been a leading scholar in the fields of anthropology and folklore for nearly forty years, during which he has untiringly made a case for interpretation. His professed academic credo, "To make sense of nonsense, find a rationale for the irrational, and seek to make the unconscious conscious" (p. 137), places Dundes on a path also trod by Freud and Levi-Strauss (see Tristes Tropiques [Pion, 1955], pp. 61-63); however, Dundes's constant effort to interweave structural description and Freudian interpretation has set him against the grain of mainstream folkloristics. He reckons "folklorists are too often regarded (rightly, I think) by their fellow academics as mere collectors and classifiers, but rarely if ever as bona fide scholars seeking to analyze their data meaningfully" (p. ix). Alternatively, Dundes hopes to pave the way for "psychoanalytic folkloristics" (p. x) in showing that psychoanalysis provides the necessary tools-namely, a "range of concepts such as 'projection' and 'family romance' (the Oedipus and Electra complexes)" (p. xvi)-to understand folklore.
Bloody Mary in...