Discussion of Beryl Sandford's Article, Cinderella

The professional folklorist is invariably annoyed with psychiatrists' analyses of folktales for several recurrent reasons. First, the analyst proceeds in almost total ignorance of the relevant folkloristic scholarship which often includes whole monographs devoted to the particular tale treated. Second, the analyst is usually not even familiar with previous psychoanalytic studies of the same tale. Third, the analyst generalizes on the basis of one single version of a widespread tale, and not infrequently the single version chosen is atypical.

Beryl Sandford's enjoyable and insightful paper on Cinderella would probably annoy most folklorists. Her reference to 400 versions indicates a familiarity (perhaps only indirect) with Marian Roalfe Cox's1 Cinderella which was published in 1893. To folklorist Anna Birgitta Rooth's2 splendid monograph, The Cinderella Cycle, published in 1951, based upon approximately 700 versions, there is no reference. (Sandford could have found such references by consulting Stith Thompson's3 The Types of the Folktale under tale type 510A Cinderella.) Similarly, there are no references to the previous psychological studies of Cinderella.4,5,6,7 (Sandford could have found references to these plus the whole vast

literature devoted to psychoanalytic studies of fairy tales by consulting Alexander Grinstein's 9-volume Index o