The dynamic relationship between ideas in the two intellectual disciplines. Psychological
theory has come to help some folklorists interpret the meanings of their materials, and
some psychologists have turned to folklore for texts to help illuminate concepts in
psychology. As the intellectual discipline that takes as its realm the understanding of the
workings of the human mind, psychology addresses a number of concepts, such as
“personality” and “identity,” that are of central interest to folklorists. When folklorists
and other culture critics write of the “psychological functions” of a folklore text or a
performance, they are making the assumption that human beings have certain biological
and, possibly, socially constructed needs that folklore helps meet. Psychology addresses
collective as well as individual needs, so folklorists can speak both of the individual
psychological functions of folklore and of the ways folklore operates in the psychology
of the group.
It was only near the end of the 19th century that scientific psychology emerged as a
discipline separate from philosophy or theology, and the professionalization of the two
intellectual disciplines in the United States occurred at almost the same time (the
American Folklore Society was founded in 1888; the American Psychological
Association, in 1892). Sigmund Freud’s work laid out the first understanding of the
relations between psychology and folklore. Freud saw jokes, folktales, art, and other
expressive behaviors as symptoms of the unconscious processes and contents of the
mind. Just as the symptoms of an individual patient represented repressed thoughts
displaced into more acceptable forms, so Freud saw collective expressive behaviors as
clues to the thoughts society repressed in order for people to live together. Thus, the
depth psychologies of Freud and others offer folklorists a theory to account for the
symbolism present in the folklore (stories, jokes, riddles, proverbs, song lyrics, rituals,
games, and material culture) of a group. Carl Jung and his followers, notably Joseph
Campbell, went beyond Freud to posit universal archetypes in the collective human
consciousness and looked to mythologies for evidence of these archetypes.
Despite the early popular reception of Freud’s ideas in the United States (he lectured
in the United States in 1910) and despite the development of a psychoanalytical school of
anthropological theory and practice in the 1930s and 1940s (represented in the late 20th
century, for example, by the Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology), psychoanalytic
approaches have not become common in American folklore studies. Alan Dundes is the
leading proponent of the psychoanalytic approach, sometimes combining it with the
structural approach he has also helped promote in folklore studies, but most folklorists
have not followed his lead. Some folklorists have been openly hostile to psychoanalytic
approaches, complaining that the theory posits an unacceptable universalism and that the
method relies so much upon the analyst’s idiosyncratic interpretive performance that the
interpretation is not reproducible. Dundes’ own practices attempt to refute these charges,
but he and other psychoanalytic folklorists cannot deny the fundamental disagreement
they have with some other folklorists over the ability of the folk to help the folklorist
interpret their own folklore. For Dundes and others ascribing to the psychoanalytic
approach, the folk can show us the meanings of their folklore texts only indirectly, as
those texts reflect the unconscious and serve their psychological functions only to the
extent that the folk do not bring the repressed thoughts and anxieties (about sex, death, or
racial hatred, for example) to consciousness. For other folklorists, the folk’s
interpretations of the meanings of their lore are valuable contributions to our
understanding the multiple meanings of texts in their performance contexts.
Folklorist David Hufford has urged folklorists to expand their interdisciplinary
cooperation with psychologists beyond the psychoanalysts, and he demonstrates the fruits
of psychological approaches in his own work on the folkloric dimensions of medical
beliefs and practices. But, again, few folklorists have accepted Hufford’s invitation.
Psychological approaches lend themselves quite well to the study of children’s
folklore, as developmental psychology has a long history of theorizing and practice.
Martha Wolfenstein wrote a classic psychoanalytic study of children’s humor, and Brian
Sutton-Smith has combined developmental psychology with folklore methods to study
the structures and functions of children’s storytelling and joking. The notion of
“competence” in folklore performance studies (for example, narrative competence)
intersects with developmental psychol-ogy in studies in which folklorists have
determined at what ages and at what stages of cognitive development children are
capable of understanding and telling stories, jokes, riddles, and so on.
Feminist folklorists have turned to some of the work done by feminist psychologists
for ideas to bring back to the study of women’s folklore. Carol Gilligan and others
attempting to create a “new psychology of women” since the 1970s provide concepts and
vocabularies for understanding the very different functions of communication and
identity within women’s small groups, but feminist folklorists have been reluctant to
adopt even the feminist revisions of Freud offered by Juliett Michell, Nancy Chodorow,
and others. Still another area awaiting the applications of feminist psychology is the
folklore of male folk groups. One version of the new “men’s studies” emerging in the
1990s brings two decades’ worth of feminist theory to bear upon the creation and
expressive performance of masculinities, and feminist psychology could shed new light
on men’s folklore.
Those folklorists who have written on the relation between folklore and psychology—
notably, Dundes, Fine, and Hufford—generally bemoan the fact that there is so little
interdisciplinary cross-fertilization between these two intellectual disciplines, which
share a common interest in questions of meaning and identity. This lack became all the
more pronounced in the 1980s, as senior scholars (such as Jerome Bruner) in social
psychology, child psychology, and other specialties within psychology turned
increasingly from experimental approaches toward a “narrative paradigm” that would be
familiar to folklorists. Folklorists and psychologists have a great deal to learn from one
another, but as of this writing (1995) the possibilities of this interdisciplinary cooperation
have yet to be fulfilled.
Jay Mechling
References
Bruner, Jerome. 1986. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Dundes, Alan. 1971. On the Psychology of Legend. In American Folk Legend, ed. Wayland
D.Hand. Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 21–36.
——. 1980. Interpreting Folklore. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
——. 1991. The Psychological Studies of Folklore in the United States, 1880–1980. Southern
Folklore 48:97–120.
Fine, Gary Alan. 1992. Evaluating Psychoanalytic Folklore: Are Freudians Ever Right? In
Manufacturing Tales: Sex and Money in Contemporary Legends. Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, pp. 45–58.
Hufford, David. 1974. Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Folklore. Southern Folklore Quarterly
38:187–197.
Mechling, Jay. 1984. High Kybo Floater: Food and Feces in the Speech Play at a Boy Scout Camp.
Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology 7:256–268.
Oring, Elliott. 1992. Jokes and Their Relatiom. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Sutton-Smith, Brian. 1981. The Folkstories of Children. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Wolfenstein, Martha. [1954] 1978. Childrens Humor: A Psychological Anafysis. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.