THE PIONEER OF PSYCHOANALYTIC FOLKLORE IN TÜRKİYE: SEYFİ KARABAŞ / TÜRKİYE’DE PSİKANALİTİK FOLKLORUN ÖNCÜSÜ: SEYFİ KARABAŞ

Abstract

Seyfi Karabaş who studied on literature of English, French and Turkish comparatively, was interested in folklore when studying on his doctoral thesis titled Structure and Function in the Dede Korkut Narratives. He published some books and many articles on folklore when he was teaching English literature courses at the Department of Foreign Language Education in Middle East Technical University after he returned from United States of America. Seyfi Karabaş was the pioneer of psychoanalytic folklore in Türkiye with his works Bütüncül Türk Budunbilimine Doğru (1981) and Dede Korkut’ta Renkler (1996) in which Dede Korkut stories, traditional Turkish quatrains and folk songs were studied through structuralist method and analysed by psychoanalytic theory. This article tries to achieve two goals: the first one is to understand Karabaş’ personality which affects his academic performance with interviewing his fourteen colleagues and students; and the second one is to examine his books as initiating psychoanalitic approach in folklore studies in Türkiye.

Keywords

• Seyfi Karabaş
• psychoanalytic folklore
• Bütüncül Türk Budunbilimine Doğru
• Dede Korkut’ta Renkler