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This book is a collection of seven essays plus a Preface, which, as I will explain below, I found to be in some ways the most novel and stimulating part of the book. The essays, most of them already published as journal articles, cover a diverse range of topics with no unifying thread other than Dundee's characteristic application of a particular kind of psychoanalytic interpretation to the materials he addresses. Two of the articles, one on Disney's film The Little Mermaid and the other on fraternity hazing, are coauthored with Lauren Dundes, Alan's daughter, a sociologist at Western Maryland College.
To those familiar with Alan Dundee's vast output over the course of his long and extremely prolific career, the papers in the current collection do not represent any new departures. His essays almost invariably address a given topic by beginning with a thick ethnographic description of the phenomenon under discussion, followed by a very thorough review of the existing literature on the topic in many languages, and concluding with an interpretation, usually at once surprising, ingenious, and both right on and also sometimes a bit pat, drawing on the classical psychoanalytic writings on folklore and symbolism, relying heavily on Freud and Jung as well as on Jones, Rank, Bettelheim, and sometimes Klein. A pervasive influence and precursor is Géza Róheim, whose title as the leading exponent of psychoanalytic folkloristics of his generation Dundes certainly can claim without dispute. At their best, his essays impress and delight with their combination of great erudition and the punch of their solutions, which often result in a genuine “aha!” experience for the reader at all open to them. At their less inspired, they can also seem predictable and a bit quaint in their evocation of a style of psychoanalytic interpretation that has long since been superseded in the academy by newer (though not necessarily better) approaches with their own favored concepts, catch-phrases, and j