Finding the Folklore in the Annals of Psychiatry

Abstract

The rise of the folklore movement in the nineteenth century coincided with the development of psychiatry as a discipline and as a profession. There is no evidence of folklorists visiting asylums for source material, and most psychiatrists showed little interest in the beliefs of their patients, but they both recorded folklore. While early folklorists were attracted to the new scholarly discipline of psychology, and later to psychoanalysis, it was actually the psychiatrists who left behind the most valuable archive of popular mentalities for contemporary folklorists to explore.