Self Therapy Techniques for Personal

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Schiffman, Muriel

Psychology & Counseling

Psyche Press

The Dream of Culture: Essays on Culture's Elusiveness

What is culture? Where is it located? What is it for? Where does it come from? Why do cultures persist over time? How do cultures change? The Dream of Culture attempts to unravel a paradox: that human beings strive to keep asleep while priding ourselves on being wide awake. Just as the work of dreaming is to safeguard sleep, much of the work of culture is likewise to keep us from thinking, feeling, and knowing too much during waking hours.  Much of culture is not merely like a dream. In culture, ours is the tragic conceit to dream that we are not dreaming, and to make wakefulness the most heinous sin. This book explores the hypothesis that culture is our dreaming together while we are wide awake. People in groups, awake, do with their shared symbolic and ritual materials, their technology and their environment, what we each also do while asleep: wish what we may dare, and disguise our wishes; contrive our forbidden victories and stage our defeats; attempt to master what we have found overwhelming. Culture and dreams are part of each other, twin (isomorphic) facets of the same process. In this book, Howard Stein explores the work of culture as if it were a species of dream work.

Politics & Social Sciences

Howard F. Stein

Social Sciences

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