Folklore includes myths, legends, customs, tales, songs, proverbs, jokes, curses, charms, games, superstitions, and rituals. Folkloristics, as Alan Dundes defines it in his slender volume Bloody Mary in the Mirror: Essays in Psychoanalytic Folkloristics, is “the academic study of folklore” (p. 55). When folkloristics is combined with psychoanalytic analysis, insight, and thinking, psychoanalytic folkloristics (the term Dundes proposes here for his discipline) makes for extremely revealing and illuminating thinking and reading.

Dundes, a professor or anthropology and folklore at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of numerous books (both academic and popular) on various aspects of folklore, has turned his perceptive, methodical, and acute attentions here to analyzing and interpreting a diverse group of seven folk tales, games, and rituals. These consist of an attempt to understand the psychological logic of ritual fasting and self-mutilation as a way of summoning the gods; a view of the pervasive