The Mimetic Nature of Dream Mentation: American Selves in Re-formation

Jeannette Mageo is Professor of cultural anthropology at Washington State University, USA. Her work focuses on dreaming and the self, on child development, and on how subjectivity, identity, and emotion evolve out of cultural and historical experiences. Her manifold writings on dreams show that cultural models and their associated schemas tie the most profound aspects of personal experience to politics and public culture.  Models dictate practices but they also inscribe relations of privileging and marginalization within the self and, she argues, generate anxiety and resistances that are registered and negotiated in the imaginary realm.

Part I - A Mimetic Theory of the Dreams.- 1.Mimesis and Dreaming: An Introduction.- 2.Mimetic Strategies of Signification in Dreams.- Chapter 3.Mimesis in the Theater of Dreams.- 4.Mimesis Makes for Ambiguity.- Part II - Competing/Complementary Theories.- 5.Mimesis Makes the Metaphors.- 6.Nightmares, Or Threat Simulation as Mimetic Commentary.- 7.Beyond Continuity and Social Simulation.- Part III - Mimesis and American Selves.- 8.The Close Family and American Cultural Psychodynamics.- 9.Mirror-phase Cultural Psychology and American Specular Selves.- 10.Dreams, Mimesis, and Consciousness.