U.S. Traveling Self-Models

Abstract

Many psychologists and anthropologists think dreams depict people’s sense of self.¹ Hollan (2003a, 2005) argues that dreams offer us the nightly news of the self, updating its relations to internal and external worlds. I want to go further: dreams offer us news updates about cultural self-models in flux. What I am proposing here is, first, we hold shared self-models in figurative form just as we do other cultural models. Second, as in the case of other cultural models, dreams depict and develop self-models, particularly models beset by contradictions, which act as irritants and thereby stimulants to individual dreaming. And, third, how a self-model is changing in a culture can be discovered through a technique I call Figurative Analysis.