Fire in the Dragon and Other Psychoanalytic Essays on Folklore

By Géza Róheim and Alan Dundes

The only Freudian to have been originally trained in folklore and the first psychoanalytic anthropologist to carry out fieldwork, Gza Rcheim (1891-1953) contributed substantially to the worldwide study of cultures. Combining a global perspective with encyclopedic knowledge of ethnographic sources, this Hungarian analyst demonstrates the validity of Freudian theory in both Western and non-Western settings. These seventeen essays, written between 1922 and 1953, are among Rcheim's most significant published writings and are collected here for the first time to introduce a new generation of readers to his unique interpretations of myths, folktales, and legends.


From Australian aboriginal mythology to Native American trickster tales, from the Grimm folktale canon to Hungarian folk belief, Rcheim explores a wide range of issues, such as the relationship of dreams to folklore and the primacy of infantile conditioning in the formation of adult fantasy. An introduction by folklorist Alan Dundes describes Rcheim's career, and each essay is prefaced by a brief consideration of its intellectual and bibliographical context.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Aug 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9780691234212

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE FOLKTALE

It was often Róheim's reading of an essay by some other scholar that stimulated him to write a reply. In this case, psychologist F. C. Bartlett wrote Psychology in Relation to the Popular Story Folklore 31 (1920):264-93 which provoked Róheim. Bartlett, perhaps better known for his alleged laboratory testing of the oral transmission process—e.g., Some Experiments on the Reproduction of Folk Stories, Folklore 31 (1920):30-47, reprinted in Alan Dundes, ed., The Study of Folklore (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 243-58—displayed the typical academic psychologist's hostility towards psychoanalytic theory.

Róheim's staunch advocacy of a Freudian approach to folktales is still well worth reading, especially since the majority of folklorists continue to reject such an approach out of hand.

AN INTERESTING paper by Mr. F. C. Bartlett¹ in one of the recent numbers of Folk-Lore deals with the claims of psychology in general to contain the key that will unlock the difficult and much discussed problem of the 'folk-tale' or 'Märchen'. He tells us that the psychological theories relating to the folk-tale have received new impetus from Freud's study of dreams.² 2 However, he wishes to criticise all attempts to interpret the folk-tale as an 'individual expression' and devotes his chief attention to those who apply Freud's views on dreams to the mechanisms determining the growth of the popular tale, particularly Rank (The Myth of the Birth of the Hero) and Riklin (Wish-Fulfilment and Symbolism in Fairy Tales).

He begins his criticism by telling us that 'wish-fulfilment' is not an acceptable explanation from the point of view of scientific psychology. For if a wish means only a 'directed tendency' the explanation is far too general, since it refers to an element which is present in all modes of human behaviour. If however something more definite is to be understood by wish-fulfilment, for instance the memory-image left by former satisfactions of certain bodily cravings, then these are themselves 'the result of incoming experience acquired in the course of the mental life and so themselves call for explanation by reference to