Perls

Guides

The following is research that helped us with our dreamscape.

Perls, Fritz. The Gestalt Approach: Eyewitness to Therapy. Science and Behavior Books. 1973.

-The Gestalt approach considers the individual as “a function of the organism/environment field, and which considers his behavior as reflecting his relatedness within that field” What Dr. Perls is describing here is the relation between the individual and his environment. He notes that both have an effect on each other and subsequently the individual’s behavior will be affected by this relationship. According to this theory the relationship between man and environment is constantly changing, therefore an individual must continuously be adapting or risk isolation or loss of identity. The means by which the individual and environment interact are called introjection and projection. Introjection is the process by which we internalize the outside world. Projection, on the other hand, is when we “shift the boundary between ourselves and the rest of the world in our favor.”

Edwards, Cynthia, Heining-Boynton, David, Huber, John R. (Eds.). Cornerstones of Psychology: Readings in the History of Psychology. Ft. Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers. 2000.

-Max Wertheimer article ( A Source Book of Gestalt psychology) discusses the influence of perceiving things as a whole…that is to say that we do not break down structures into their basic elements when we observe them, rather we understand them as a whole…Sort of what we were trying to do. We brought out and up front the worst memories and visuals we have had and made you watch them at once. Although they were all different without any one wall it would have completely changed the experience. The emotions felt were only possible because of the combinations of all three wall (we tied them all together at the end to signify the true connectedness). These are the basic underpinnings of the Gestalt school of psychology.

-Freud Article (The Psychopathology of everyday life). This article gives a really good example of the role of free-association in the present. Shows how through a regulated process of free word-association, an individual is capable of tapping into the unconscious sources of all that they express (purposely or not) in their conscious observable behavior. This relates a great deal to our class in that it provides Freud’s ideas about the effects of the sub-conscious without specifically discussing dreams. That is to say that a dream-like state of unintentional relationships and seemingly incoherent ideas can be given order and meaning through the evaluation of past repressed experience.

Foulkes, David. Children’s Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts. London, England, 1999.

- Infantile Amnesia is our inability to remember events from the first few years of our lives. The kind of memory to which the infantile amnesia refers to is what Endel Tulving has called conscious episodic recollection, the conscious recreation of discrete episodes in our waking lives. Conscious episodic recollection are momentary constructions out of information left behind by past experiences, as also guided by information acquired subsequent to the event in question. These conscious recollections are actively created, not passively retrieved. Cognitively, they have the same status as dream images- they stimulate reality purely from information currently available in the cognitive system. To be recalled consciously, an event must first be experienced consciously.

Schultz, Duane. A History of Modern Psychology (7^th edition). Harcourt College Publisher. 2000.

-Chapter on Dissentors and Descendants. It was here that we found a very clear description of Jung’s analytic psychology. Jung's notion of a public consciousness closely parallels the notion of collective memory. It is a concept that is totally separate from the personal conscious and is made up of 4 distinguished archetypes:

1)Anima and Animus- reflects the idea that every individual reflects some of the characteristics of the other sex...and as we age the defining boundaries are skewed

2)Persona-our mask that represents us as we want to appear

3) Self- provides unity and stability much like a drive toward self-actualization.

4) Shadow- A darker part of the self, animalistic, immoral, passionate, unnacceptable desires and activities.

Our walls are concerned with Freuds psychoanalytic theory (the past as unconscious player in present activities and behavior) in the context of a Jungian Shadow archetype. Ana Boa Ventura had spoken of this notion of a public memory and it links quite nicely into that and in our project becomes almost strikingly evident when another person experiences our installation.

Kellerman, Henry. The Nightmare: Psychological and Biological Foundations. Columbia University Press. New York. 1987.

-Frequently included in the variety of dream experiences which are often used interchangeably with the term “nightmare” are anxiety dreams, punishment dreams, post-traumatic dreams, and night terrors. Mack (1970) states that all nightmares regardless of severity or place in the sleep cycle have as their manifest theme danger and helplessness, and as their latent content conflict and fear regarding destructive aggression, sexually linked with annihilation, loss of identity, and loss of objects. The intensity of the nightmare depends on the severity of trauma and the resilience of the ego. Nightmares are defined by Kales as nocturnal episodes of intense anxiety and fear associated with a vivid and emotionally charged dream experience. Nightmares are often accompanied by some vocalization and increased autonomic activity.

Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis. New York: Liveright. 1963.

-Found good information about the nature of dream-analysis and its relationship to the inaccessible sub-conscious as well as to the method of free-association that can be used to derive meaning. He believed that the human mind was constantly repressing certain experiences and emotions/urges and that these repressed happenings were constantly affecting the individual in ways that they had no control over.

Shafton, Anthony. Dream Reader: Contemporary Approaches to the Understanding of Dreams. State University of New York Press. Albany. 1995.

-Freudian principle of dream formation: waking events stir up unconscious impulses which then seek expression during sleep. Even apart from disguise, dreaming is predominantly a pictorial, sensorial mode of mentation. At the same time, explicit logical-linguistic operations exist beneath a dream’s surface in the latent-dream-thoughts. Dream-thoughts have to be represented as a sequence or juxtaposition of images.

Suarez-Orozco, Marcelo M. (Ed). "Cultures under siege: Collective violence and trauma." Publications of the society for psychological anthropology. New York, NY, US: Cambridge University Press. 2000, xiv, 285.

-Collective violence changes the perpetrators, the victims, and the societies in which it occurs. It targets the body, the psyche, and the sociocultural order. How do people come to terms with these tragic events, and how are cultures affected by massive outbreaks of violence? This book is a collection of essays by anthropologists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts, drawing on field research in many different parts of the world. Profiting from an interdisciplinary dialogue, the authors provide insights into the darker side of humanity, and they also propose new ways of understanding human cruelty and suffering. This book broadens the dialogue between psychoanalysis and anthropology by focusing on a set of empirical and theoretical issues around the study of violence and trauma in comparative perspective.

Kalin, Carla. Television, Children, and Violence. http://interact.uoregon.edu/MediaLit/FA/MLArticleFolder/kalin.html. June, 1997.

-Typically, U.S. children begin watching television at a very early age, sometimes as early as six months, and are fervent viewers by the time that they are two or three years old (Murray, p.1). The amount of time that American children spend watching TV is astounding: an average of four hours a day, 28 hours a week, 2,400 hours a year, nearly 18,000 hours by the time they graduate from high school (Chen, 1994, p.23). In comparison, they spend a mere 13,000 hours in school, from kindergarten through twelfth grade (Chen, 1994). American children spend more time watching TV than any other activity, besides sleeping (Chen, 1994). By the time the average American child is six, she will spend more time watching TV than talking to her father in her lifetime (Devore, 1994, p.16). Television viewing is the primary activity for American children in the hours between school and dinnertime. Nearly 80 percent of the 1,200 children surveyed by the Yanklovich Youth Monitor in 1993 reported TV viewing as their usual activity during this time (Chen, p. 99). Children living in poverty watch even more television than average -- some up to seven hours a day. By the time a poor child graduates from high school, he or she may have watched as many as 22,000 hours of TV (Sweet & Singh, 1994).