Parsing through Customs: Essays by a Freudian Folklorist

Preface

Preface There are no magic wands or vagina dentatas in real life. Folklorists , however, have persisted in treating folklore in solely literal and historical rather than symbolic and psychological terms. The emphasis has been on collection and classification, not on interpretation . Folklorists have sought to ask and answer the question "What?" but have essentially ignored the more difficult and challenging question "Why?" Description is surely a prerequisite for analysis, but it is no substitute for it. The discipline of folkloristics, the scientific study of folklore, may be said to have begun at the end of the eighteenth century in Europe. 1. G. Herder, the German philosopher and educator coined the term Volkslied (folksong) in 1773, and his idea that the folksongs of a people reflected the soul of that people was a direct inspiration to the brothers Grimm. The publication of the brothers' celebrated Kinder und Hausmarchen (vol. 1 in 1812 and vol. 2 in 1815), sparked an intellectual revolution throughout Europe , and the entire world for that matter; members of the academy left the sanctuary of the ivory tower to sit at the feet of the common man to record stories and songs in dialect. The stunning success of the Grimm brothers' collection of folktales led scholars in other countries, also imbued with feelings of romanticism and nationalism, to prove that they too had a folklore patrimony worthy of preservation. So Jorgen Moe teamed up with Peter Christen Asbjornsen in the 1840s to jointly vii viii Preface collect and publish a famous collection of Norwegian folktales. In much the same fashion, the great Russian folklorist Aleksandr Nikolaevich Afanasyev published Narodnye russkie skazki (Popular Russian Tales) from 1855 to 1864. Numerous collections of folktales from many countries published in the nineteenth century resulted from the initial impetus provided by the Grimm brothers. These collectors recognized the fantastic content of the tales they collected, but they could make little headway in elucidating the content of folktales and other genres of folklore. In fact, some of the first theories proposed were almost as fantastic as the tales themselves, e.g., that primitive man was solely concerned with the rising and setting of the sun and that most myths reflected this concern. Folktales as secular, weakened versions of sacred myths, so the theory of solar mythology went, retained vestigial remains of articulations of these solar activities. A rival theory, lunar mythology, argued that it was the movements of the moon, not the sun, which preoccupied primitive man. (A Freudian could well suggest that these theories themselves with their obsession with the rising and setting of suns and moons are merely projections of phallic tumescence and detumescence displaced to "heavenly" bodies.) In retrospect, one might well regret that the field of psychology which might have facilitated the interpretation of folktale content, was not yet sufficiently developed when the tales were collected. Psychoanalytic theory began with the writings of Sigmund Freud. He was much interested in folklore and encouraged many of his earliest disciples-Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Carl Jungto investigate myth and folktale, utilizing psychoanalytic techniques . So folkloristics, which emerged in the beginning of the nineteenth century-the word folklore was coined by an Englishman named William Thoms only in 1846-had to wait until the end of that century for psychoanalytic theory to be formulated before there was any real possibility of applying such theory to the materials of folklore. Freud's The Interpretation ofDreams (1900), and his Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905) with its brilliant content analyses of traditional Jewish jokes, both pointed out the enor- Preface ix mous potential of psychoanalytic theory as a tool for deciphering the symbolic content of myths, folktales, legends, and other forms of folklore such as custom and belief. But folklorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries paid no attention to Freud whatsoever. Freudian theory, if mentioned at all, was strictly an object of ridicule. Not even the stimulating monographs published by Freud's early followers (e.g., Otto Rank's The Myth oj the Birth oj the Hero [1909]; Karl Abraham's Dreams and Myths [1909]; the remarkable writings of Ernest Jones-especially his Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis, vol. 2, Essays in Folklore, Anthropology and Religion [1951]-and Geza R6heim's The Gates oj the Dream [1953]) seem to have had the slightest influence on the direction of folklore scholarship. If one examines any of the standard works available on the history or state of folkloristics, e.g., Giuseppe...