Interpreting the Self

Interpreting the Self

Author: Dwight F. Reynolds

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 0520926110

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Autobiography is a literary genre which Western scholarship has ascribed mostly to Europe and the West. Countering this assessment and presenting many little-known texts, this comprehensive work demonstrates the existence of a flourishing tradition in Arabic autobiography. Interpreting the Self discusses nearly one hundred Arabic autobiographical texts and presents thirteen selections in translation. The authors of these autobiographies represent an astonishing variety of geographical areas, occupations, and religious affiliations. This pioneering study explores the origins, historical development, and distinctive characteristics of autobiography in the Arabic tradition, drawing from texts written between the ninth and nineteenth centuries c.e. This volume consists of two parts: a general study rethinking the place of autobiography in the Arabic tradition, and the translated texts. Part one demonstrates that there are far more Arabic autobiographical texts than previously recognized by modern scholars and shows that these texts represent an established and—especially in the Middle Ages—well-known category of literary production. The thirteen translated texts in part two are drawn from the full one-thousand-year period covered by this survey and represent a variety of styles. Each text is preceded by a brief introduction guiding the reader to specific features in the text and providing general background information about the author. The volume also contains an annotated bibliography of 130 premodern Arabic autobiographical texts. In addition to presenting much little-known material, this volume revisits current understandings of autobiographical writing and helps create an important cross-cultural comparative framework for studying the genre.


Interpreting the Self

Interpreting the Self

Author: Diane Bjorklund

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2000-04-15

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9780226054483

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In this ambitious study, Diane Bjorklund explores the historical nature of self-narrative. Examining over 100 American autobiographers published in the last two centuries, she discusses not only well-known autobiographies such as Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie but also many obscure ones such as a traveling book peddler, a minstrel, a hotel proprietress, an itinerant preacher, a West Point cadet, and a hoopskirt wire manufacturer. Bjorklund draws on the colorful stories of these autobiographers to show how their historical epoch shapes their understandings of self. "A refreshingly welcome approach to this intriguing topic. . . . [Bjorklund's] extensive and systematic approach to her source material is impressive and enriches our understanding of this essential subject."—Virginia Quarterly Review "Bjorklund studies both famous and obscure writers, and her clear prose style and copious quotations provide insight into the many aspects of the changing American self." —Library Journal


Interpreting Projective Drawings

Interpreting Projective Drawings

Author: Marvin Leibowitz

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-06-17

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1134871503

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The use of drawings to discover emotions, attitudes, and personality traits not verbally stated by a client is a valuable and widely used technique in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. In this book, the author offers a highly practical introduction to the use and interpretation of projective drawings. Grounding his approach in self psychology, Dr. Leibowitz provides detailed information on how to interpret house, tree, man, woman, and animal drawings. By pairing clinical case examples with general interpretation guidelines, the book offers a thorough examination of projective drawings, making it a valuable text for beginners and an important reference source for the seasoned clinician. Interpreting Projective Drawings contains an impressive array of drawings, with over 175 total illustrations. Almost half of these drawings are from comprehensive case studies that follow adult patients from the beginning phase of treatment to their one-year (or more) status. These include over 30 chromatic illustrations that clearly demonstrate the importance of color in projective drawing interpretation. In addition to detailed information on how to interpret these five types of achromatic and chromatic drawings, the book also contains an appendix that offers examiner instructions, instructions for self-administration, and adjective lists to aid in interpretation. Together, these components make Interpreting Projective Drawings an essential resource for any mental health professional interested in using drawings to their fullest effect in their practice.


Travels with the Self

Travels with the Self

Author: Philip Cushman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-09

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 0429886446

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Travels with the Self uses a hermeneutic perspective to critique psychology and demonstrate why the concept of the self and the modality of cultural history are so vitally important to the profession of psychology. Each chapter focuses on a theory, concept, sociopolitical or professional issue, philosophical problem, or professional activity that has rarely been critiqued from a historical, sociopolitical vantage point. Philip Cushman explores psychology’s involvement in consumerism, racism, shallow understandings of being human, military torture, political resistance, and digital living. In each case, theories and practices are treated as historical artifacts, rather than expressions of a putatively progressive, modern-era science that is uncovering the one, universal truth about human being. In this way, psychological theories and practices, especially pertaining to the concept of the self, are shown to be reflections of the larger moral understandings and political arrangements of their time and place, with implications for how we understand the self in theory and clinical practice. Drawing on the philosophies of critical theory and hermeneutics, Cushman insists on understanding the self, one of the most studied and cherished of psychological concepts, and its ills, practitioners, and healing technologies, as historical/cultural artifacts — surprising, almost sacrilegious, concepts. To this end, each chapter begins with a historical introduction that locates it in the historical time and moral/political space of the nation’s, the profession’s, and the author’s personal context. Travels with the Self brings together highly unusual and controversial writings on contemporary psychology that will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, psychologists of all stripes, as well as scholars of philosophy, history, and cultural studies.


Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self

Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self

Author: Eric Wargo

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-03-02

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1644112701

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• Outlines a set of clear principles to help guide dreamworkers, illustrated through real precognitive dream experiences • Shows how to detect precognitive dreams through their characteristic features, explaining how dreams relate to memory and why dreams about future experiences are often symbolic or distorted • Explores the mind-blowing implications of precognition for our lives, including how our present thoughts actually shape--or shaped--our past Once only the stuff of science fiction, evidence has grown that precognition--glimpses of your future in dreams and visions and being influenced subtly in waking life by what is to come--is real. Your future thoughts and feelings shape who you are now. And your present thoughts and feelings shape--or shaped--your past. In this accessible exploration of precognition, precognitive dreamwork, and a radically new biographical sensibility, the Long Self, that precognition awakens us to, Eric Wargo shows how dreamworkers can play the role of citizen scientists, adding to our understanding of this fascinating, almost unexplored dimension of human life. Wargo outlines a set of clear principles to guide dreamworkers, each illustrated through real dreamers’ experiences. Drawing on psychoanalysis and contemporary sleep science, he explores how precognition relates to memory, explaining why dreams of future experiences are often distorted and what those distortions probably mean. He discusses never-before-described dream features, including “time gimmicks” (symbols hinting at time distortion) and “calendrical resonance” (the tendency of dreams to foretell experiences exactly a year or years later). He describes why an understanding of precognition augments Jung’s theory of synchronicity by highlighting our own role in producing meaningful coincidences in our waking lives. He also shows how precognition manifests in other states of consciousness like lucid dreams, out-of-body experiences, trance states, sleep paralysis, meditation, and hypnagogia. We are at a major turning point in science’s understanding of time, causality, and the self. We are more than who we think we are from moment to moment--we are our past, present, and future simultaneously. When we understand this, a dream journal becomes a personal time machine, with mind-blowing discoveries in store for the traveler.


Reading Autobiography

Reading Autobiography

Author: Sidonie Smith

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 0816669856

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projects, and an extensive bibliography. --Book Jacket.