Dreams and Professional Personhood: The Contexts of Dream Telling and Dream Interpretation among American Psychotherapists

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SUNY Press, Jan 1, 1991 - Psychology - 271 pages
Two community mental health centers in the Northeastern United States form the setting for this ethnographic study of dreams, dream telling, and dream interpretation. To gather information about American attitudes toward dreams and dream telling, the author observed and interviewed employees of these centers: social workers, psychologists, nurses, psychiatrists, secretaries, and medical technicians. The issues that emerge from the interviews are analyzed and clarified by exploring Western understandings of the concepts of person and self, and of professional personhood--the capacities and responsibilities ascribed to you by yourself and others in your milieu as professionals. The book also contains a comprehensive literature review of the research on dreams and an appendix of narrative statements made by informants on their dreams, their work, and their relationships.
 

Contents

Introduction Background and Foreground
1
Research in Physiology of Dreaming and Dream Psychology
3
Clinical Observation and Research in Dreams
6
Anthropological Research in Dreams and Dream Telling
14
Issues of Space
22
Issues of Space
26
Analytic Concepts and Research Questions
41
The Psychotherapist Simply as a Person
45
Psychotherapy Dream Telling and Hierarchy
147
Who Is a Real Doctor?
148
Reading the Mind and the Importance of Biology
163
The Dream Interpretation Hierarchy
165
Womans Work and Womens Professions
168
Tending the Body and Listening to the Person
183
The DreamHearing Range
186
Conclusion
189

Analytic Concepts of Person and Self
46
Professional Setting and Home Base
49
The Enduring Experiencing Person
68
The Dreaming Self and the Working Person
71
Summary and Conclusion
82
The Contexts of Dream Telling
85
Emic Perspectives
86
Emic and Etic Perspectives
88
Typology of Dream Telling Contexts
90
When Contexts Converge
99
Conclusion
115
Dream Interpretation Freudian Mythology and the American Mystique of Dreams
119
The Exploration Process and Method
120
Local Ideas about Dream Interpretation
121
Three Dreams
128
The Contexts of Dream Interpretation
139
The Popularization of Freud and the American Mystique of Dreams
143
Showing the Person and Knowing the Person
191
Not Showing the Person
193
Showing that One Knows Oneself
194
The Incongruities between Person and Self
196
The Disjunction of Mind and Body
197
How Contexts Are Described
201
The Meaning of Crazy
207
Psychological Mindedness
209
Higher FunctioningLower Functioning
211
Who Is a Real Doctor? What Psychiatrists Said
215
Hierarchical Issues
219
Which of the Psychotherapy Professionals Are More Likely to Ask about and Listen to Dreams?
227
Notes
233
Bibliography
241
Indexes
259
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About the author (1991)

Mary-T. B. Dombeck has been a psychotherapist for ten years and is on the faculty at the University of Rochester School of Nursing.

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