Psychological Anthropology

L. Bryce Boyer, M.D.: Childhood and Folklore: a Psychoanalytic Study of Apache Personality New York: Library of Psychological Anthropology, 1979.

IN PREINDUSTRIAL SOCIETIES WHERE THERE is no television, radio, literature or formal schooling, stories and myths play a crucial role in shaping the developmental process. It is difficult for Westerners to appreciate how important folklore can be in interpreting the world to a child, in defining the emotional ties with caretakers, and in providing a shared symbolic language familar to all. Originally intending to study personality development among the Apache, Bryce Boyer was led to his concern with the importance of Apache folklore through his original and creative research method: for periods of as long as fifteen months, over many years, Boyer served as psychiatrist to the Apache, living on the reservation, studying resistances and transference reactions and their implications. As a highly experienced and astute clinician (he has contributed to the pages of this Journal), he has been able to create a picture of Apache personality through observing reactions to interpretations in the treatment process. In the course of this work, he found that the Apache often made overt or veiled references to folklore, and reared their children in the constant awareness of mythic figures, mountain spirits, ghosts and witches. For example, toddlers are typically threatened with the whippoorwill who is believed to become a cannibal woman at night who will carry off a crying child if it doesn't stop bothering a parent. In this way the folklore serves as a displacement system—children learn to direct their fear and anger onto culturally provided figures, as parents express their hostility through the "bogeyman". The phobic-counterphobic aspect of Apache adult personality can be traced to this practice too. Boyer feels his work parallels Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment which showed for a Western culture