Response by Alan Dundes
[Utz Jeggle's article]
Better Late Than Never:
The Case for Psychoanalytic Folkloristics
Utz Jeggle's honest and engaging think-piece on the possible relevance of psychoanalytic theory to the discipline of folkloristics is of interest more for what he fails to say than for what he does say. We have a senior, respected German folklorist who has evidently read some of Freud's writings and decided near the end of his career that maybe, just maybe, some of Freud's insights could possibly illuminate folkloristic data. The "unconscious," Jeggle suggests, might help explain the content of dreams and superstitions. This is surely a case of re-discovering or re-inventing the wheel!
What is sad about this effort is that it is devoid, or should I say totally innocent, of any attempt to consult close to a century's worth of scholarship on all the issues discussed and what is even more disgraceful is that the bulk of that scholarship was firstpublishedin German, Jeggle's native language!
Anyone reading this essay with no knowledge whatsoever of Freud or his followers might easily get the impression that virtually no one hitherto besides Freud himself, and now Jeggle, had ever suggested that there could be an unconscious component in folkloristic forms. There are so many sources available for every one of the topics mentioned by Jeggle that one scarcely knows where to begin.
Let's start with dreams since that is his first example. Freud and a gymnasium teacher D. E. Oppenheim teamed up to write Dreams in Folklore circa 1911, a paper in which Oppenheim selected folktales from the pages of Anthropophyteia (1904-13), an important folklore journal specializing in obscene folklore, edited by Friedrich Krauss, who was a folklorist described in detail in Raymond L. Burt's Friedrich Salomo Krauss (1859-1938), a monograph in German (1990) not cited by Jeggle. Krauss even asked Freud to write a letter of support for the journal, which Freud did, and in fact, Freud's name appeared on the editorial masthead for volumes 7-9 (1910-12), which is a definite sign of Freud's involvement in folklore research. In the tales selected by Oppenheim there were dreams. The dreams were interpreted in these [End Page 95] tales and the symbolism contained therein turned out to be so-called Freudian symbolism. This was an early statement supporting Freud's oft-repeated claim that the source of a people's unconscious symbolism was folklore. The essay begins: "The symbolism employed in these dreams coincides completely with that accepted by psychoanalysis and . . . a number of these dreams are understood by the common people in the same way as they would be interpreted by psychoanalysis—that is, not as premonitions about a still unrevealed future, but as the fulfillment of wishes . . . " (Freud and Oppenheim 1958). Now it is true that this paper was lost for nearly fifty years, partly because Oppenheim left Freud's Viennese circle after an initial interest in psychoanalysis, defecting to join Adler. It turned up in Oppenheim's daughter's possession in Australia and it was not published until 1958 (in both the original German and in English translation). But the point is that it has been available since that time and it provides better examples of the application of psychoanalytic theory to the unconscious content of German-language dreams than anything contained in Jeggle's discussion of the subject.
Most of Freud's followers did apply psychoanalytic theory to folklore, notably Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, and Ernest Jones, among others, none of whom are named by Jeggle. Perhaps the most glaring omission is Géza Róheim, the first psychoanalytic folklorist, whose early writings were in Hungarian and in German. As for dreams, one might at the very least have noted Róheim's magnum opus, The Gates of the Dream (1952). Incidentally, in that work, Róheim has a phallic interpretation of the "legs" in the riddle of the Sphinx discussed by Jeggle. Easy access to several of Róheim's many essays is provided by his book Fire in the Dragon and Other Psychoanalytic Essays on Folklore (1992). Anyone seriously interested in any of the topics covered in Jeggle's paper should consult Alexander Grinstein's fourteen volume Index of Psychoanalytic Writings (1956-75), at least for the earlier books and articles, including many devoted to superstitions.
With respect to superstition, Jeggle is surely correct in his relating the Freudian principle of the "omnipotence of thought" to that folkloristic genre, but it is a pity that he did not give more concrete illustrations of the principle at work. For example, in American folklore, we have the superstition that "If a person takes an umbrella from home in the morning, it will not rain that day" or "If a person does [End Page 96] not take an umbrella from home in the morning, it will rain that day." Clearly, an individual's thought that his or her action with respect to taking an umbrella from home is going to influence the weather for the entire region is an instance of the principle. Freud himself provides an excellent report of another relevant superstition in a letter of 30 January 1875, written to his childhood friend Eduard Silberstein: "When I was a child, I firmly believed in the envy of the "so-called gods" and would take care not to speak of fulfillment of a precious wish lest I invoke the very opposite."
One of the best illustrations of the application of psychoanalytic theory to folklore was written by Freud himself in his analysis of Jewish jokes. It was published in 1905, almost a full century ago, but again it is not even referred to by Jeggle. Nor does Jeggle mention the late Gershon Legman's remarkable psychoanalytic coverage of jokes in Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1968) and No Laughing Matter (1975).
Another area of folklore that has provided convincing examples of the application of psychoanalytic theory to folklore is the folktale, especially the fairy tale. Surprisingly, Jeggle doesn't say anything about Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment (1976), a popular book known widely outside the academy, and which successfully brought the application of psychoanalytic theory to the attention of the literate public.
The truth is that although Jeggle does purport to deal with the "unconscious," almost all of his examples are based on conscious, not unconscious reasoning. There is no real insight in his discussion of "lost" objects. Why exactly were they lost? Presumably there are unconscious reasons, but there are no persuasive illustrations. As for the significance of forgetting, Freud's demonstration in The Psycho-pathology of Everyday Life, first published in 1901, had much more convincing examples. I might offer just one instance here. When taking their final examinations at the university, students are invited to submit self-addressed postcards to their instructors so that they might receive their final course grades prior to the official notification sent out by the registrar. On occasion, I have had students turn in such postcards with requests to send them their grades on the midterm, the course project, the final exam, and their overall grade in the course, but they failed to put their name and address on the front of [End Page 97] the postcard. The point is that "forgetting" to do so is a pretty clear reflection of their unconscious wish not to receive what might be a failing or at any rate a disappointing grade.
I cannot stress strongly enough that almost every point made by Jeggle has been the subject of extensive published psychoanalytic inquiry, and I don't really understand why he made no effort to refer to any of it. For instance, he mentions the Kwakiutl potlatch and does refer to Mauss's 1925 essay, but Mauss's essay was not the least bit psychoanalytic. Jeggle could, in theory, have consulted my paper "Heads or Tails: A Psychoanalytic Study of Potlatch" which first appeared in the Journal of Psychological Anthropology in 1979 and was reprinted in Parsing Through Customs: Essays by a Freudian Folklorist (1987) if he really wanted to explore the possible unconscious significance of this seemingly irrational ritual practice.
So while I don't disagree with much of what Jeggle says, I am disappointed at the low level of scholarship he demonstrates, a level not consistent with the typical thoroughness of standard Germanic academic tradition. And while I am gratified that finally a ranking German folklorist has managed to admit that folklorists may have missed an opportunity by ignoring what Freud had to say—for most German folklorists it is as though Freud never even existed—I feel frustrated when I think that readers might glean from his essay that little or nothing has been written along the suggestive lines he proposes.
Let me end this comment by shamelessly mentioning several of my own works, e.g., From Game to War and Other Psychoanalytic Essays on Folklore (1997), Bloody Mary in the Mirror: Essays in Psychoanalytic Folkloristics (2002), my psychoanalytic monograph Two Tales of Crow and Sparrow: A Freudian Folkloristic Essay on Caste and Untouchability (1997), and my psychoanalytic study of Orthodox Jewish culture, The Shabbat Elevator and Other Sabbath Subterfuges: An Unorthodox Essay on Circumventing Custom and Jewish Character (2002).
I happen to know that Utz Jeggle is familiar with my book Life Is
Like A Chicken Coop Ladder: A Study of German National Character Through
Folklore (1989), which is also psychoanalytic. I know because he
was present when I gave an abridged version of it in Berlin in 1982. I
shall never forget his comment to me, made when walking out together
after the session. He said, "When I first read your paper, I was very
angry. And then I thought to myself, why am I so angry? Maybe there's
something to it after all." I have always treasured Utz Jeggle's honesty
[End Page 98]
on that occasion and his willingness to change his mind or open his mind
to new ideas. That admirable quality is also evident in his paper, but I'm
afraid it may be too little, too late. I'm not really sure Jeggle's plea
represents much of an advance over the final sentence in Freud's letter of
support for Anthropophyteia written to Krauss on 26 June 1910: "It
is therefore safe to hope that the psychological importance of folklore
will be more and more clearly recognized, and that the relations between
that branch of study and psychoanalysis will soon become more intimate."
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley
Alan Dundes is Professor of Anthropology and Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been teaching folklore courses at Berkeley since 1963. His recent publications include Holy Writ as Oral Lit: The Bible as Folklore (1999) and Bloody Mary in the Mirror: Essays in Psychoanalytic Folkloristics (2002).
References Cited
