ABSTRACT
Alan Dundes is first and foremost a folklorist who happens to be in a department of anthropology and who happens to be psychoanalytically inclined. The Folklore Archives at Berkeley have been built up over the past 25 years in conjunction with Dundes’ undergraduate course on folklore. Alan Dundes’ core message for folklorists is simple: Folklore is often the result of the sorts of psychological processes discussed by Freud. Dundes relies heavily on Freud’s suggestion that dreams represent the disguised gratification of unconscious wishes. Dundes’ series of studies on male birth-envy is likely that portion of his work that has the greatest implications for the future development of psychoanalytic theory. Dundes has used a variety of American folk materials, including jokes, urban legends, and children’s games and rhymes to demonstrate the pervasiveness of male chauvinism in American culture.
