Bloody Mary in the Mirror: Essays in Psychoanalytic Folkloristics. By Alan Bundes. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. Pp. xx + 141, preface, acknowledgments, index. $40.00 cloth); Shabbat Elevator and Other Sabbath Subterfuges: An Unorthodox Essay on Circumventing Custom and Jewish Character. By Alan Dundes. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. Pp. xiii + 201, acknowledgments, preface, bibliography, index. $60.00 cloth, $21.95 paper) Psychoanalytic folkloristics has (one might suggest charitably) an uncertain history and dubious future. More closely linked to psychoanalysis than to academic folklore, the approach demands training in two distinct intellectual arenas-both, sadly, in distress at the turn of the Millennium. Its leading proponent is Alan Dundes, who quotes colleague as describing his position as that of a leader in the field without any followers! (Mirror, p. xi); asserting that his colleagues feel extreme prejudice towards his approach. For years, Alan Dundes appeared to enjoy his role as Grand Contrarian. His zest in attacking orthodoxy was palpable, even as he felt wronged by the scorn of his audiences. As he nears the end of long and distinguished career, his intellectual isolation-an absence of scholarly offspring-has begun to grate, and his two latest works are filled with plaints against folklorists and psychoanalysts, including claim that family members have wondered about my longstanding devotion to psychoanalysis. Was Freud the best life-partner? Perhaps it is comforting that fellow folklorists have so little interest in psychodynamics that Dundes' concern with his own seminal barrenness will pass unnoticed. Both Bloody Mary in the Mirror and Shabbat Elevator are characteristic of Dundes' writings over the decades. former is collection of seven essays on different topics and of varying depth and persuasiveness, the latter an extended essay dealing with Jewish ethnic character through the lens of Sabbath observations. Each essay in Mirror is self-contained. Missing is an overall statement of psychoanalytic folklore theory, an extended argument constructed for folklorists in general rather than for specialists on any of several narrow topics. opening chapter of Mirror, The Psychoanalytic Study of Religious Custom and Belief, comes closest-it is brief essay, but one in which Dundes begins to lay out theory of religion as transformative mirror of family dynamics. Clues of this theoretical approach are evident elsewhere, as in his analysis of projective inversion in the Egyptian Two Brothers folktale (Chapter 3). (Projection theory seems to serve folklore theory well, for unlike purely textual interpretations, it potentially connects to the performance and to audience response.) Dundes' greatest strength as scholar is his vast erudition. number of different references in his corpus is awe-inspiring. Unlike many scholars whose bibliographies largely overlap, Dundes provides us with new literature in support of each analysis. In Mirror (p. xi), he reveals that when he was child, his father offered him dollar for every hundred books he read-a not-unacceptably stingy reward for so voracious reader. Whether his compulsive consumption of volumes should be treated as phallo-genital conquest, anal compulsion, or neo-classical economic rational choice I leave to others to decide, but we readers are the better for it. Dundes has, moreover, powerfully rich and organized imagination, which gives him the rare ability to create consistent and, in its detail, plausible psychoanalytic theory for each case he discusses: anal compulsion (Jewish religious custom), infantilization (fraternity initiation), menstrual anxiety (preadolescent girls' ritual), male Electra imagery (Disney's Little Mermaid), breast-feeding fantasies (vampire beliefs). interpretive punchline for each analysis, considered by itself, may occasion scoffing, but the mass of data within, usually consistent, can be persuasive. …