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Stories We Tell Ourselves
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"Dream Life" and "Seeing Things"
History
Michelle Herman Publication Year: 2013
Medicine and Health > Psychology and Psychiatry
The two thought-provoking, extended essays that make up Stories We Tell Ourselves draw from the author’s richly diverse experiences and history, taking the reader on a deeply pleasurable walk to several unexpectedly profound destinations. A steady accumulation of fascinating science, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural history—ranging as far and wide as neuro-ophthalmology, ancient dream interpretation, and the essential differences between Jung and Freud—is smoothly intermixed with vivid anecdotes, entertaining digressions, and a disarming willingness to risk everything in the course of a revealing personal narr . . . show more
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Published by: University of Iowa Press
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Cover Download PDF
pp. 1-1
Title Page, Copyright Download PDF
pp. 2-9
Contents
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Idolatry
pp. ix-11
Acknowledgements Download PDF
pp. xi-13 I am very grateful to Bret Lott, Dave Blum, Catherine Cocks, Charlotte Wright, and Kris Bjork; to my stalwart friend and agent, Marian B.S. Young; to the Ohio Arts Council; and to my father and my brother, Morton Herman and Scott Herman, for the kind of support...
Dream Life
Download PDF No Place Like Home
pp. 1-15
1 Download PDF
pp. 3-11 All day today I have been feeling melancholy and nostalgic, teary-eyed and loving toward all creatures great and small (from husband to cockatiel). Whereas yesterday all day I was irritable and angry—scolding the bird for chirping, yanking the dog when she didn’t...
2
Truth, Truthiness, Memory, and Bald-faced Lies—and the Pleasures of Uncertainty
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pp. 12-28 If I were not the sort of person who takes dreams seriously, it would not even have crossed my mind that my dream had been curative (if I even remembered it—if I even woke up knowing that I’d had a dream). But I have been paying close attention to my dreams all my...
3
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Open Access
pp. 29-40
Restricted Access Even when my cats were still alive, I dreamed of them. Mostly I had “bad” dreams about them (they were lost, or they were sick, or they had died—and more than once I dreamed that I had accidentally killed one of them, spraying her with roach poison I’d misaimed...
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pp. 41-57 Here is a paradox, speaking of what is interesting and what is not: that our dreams are so interesting to us—those who dream them (even to the professional Freud-debunkers among us)—and yet nobody wants to hear them. And we know this; and still we can’t resist...
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pp. 58-69 One always feels, waking from a dream, as if one has been “told” something. Even when the message is diffi cult to understand; even when it seems to have been written in an unfamiliar or barely remembered, once-known language, or in an indecipherable hand;...
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pp. 70-80 The psychoanalyst Karen Horney considered dreams an attempt to solve confl icts, warning us, however, that the “solutions” our dreams provide were not likely to be healthy ones. For Horney, the main purpose of dreaming is to help us see what our conflicts are. In...
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pp. 81-88 I think sometimes that the real reason we want to tell our dreams is because they are art—the art that everybody makes. When we dream, said Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, we are each the “consummate artist.” Dreams provide the universal opportunity...
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pp. 89-90 Even the most apparently banal dream-journeys, the ones we all take — hastening down a school’s long hallway to find the right room (where is it? where is it?), late for a test in a hard subject we know nothing of, the final for a class we didn’t even know that we were...
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pp. 91-96 My house has been bombed; the roof is about to cave in. Or a power line has been cut (but in the dream the power “line” is an obelisk — it looks like the Washington monument—and when it’s “cut,” it breaks cleanly in half: poisonous gas escapes from its center) and...
Seeing Things Download PDF
pp. 97-111
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pp. 99-106 We were in the kitchen, cooking together. It was early January, early evening. We were cooking and talking. Chopping, pouring, beating, scraping, setting pans in the oven and on top of the stove—a great commotion of cooking, with plenty of clatter and mess (which is...
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pp. 107-112 Adam Phillips, in his book Terrors and Experts, describes symptoms, from a psychoanalytic point of view, as secret ways of asking for something. At one time, my daughter had been full of secrets: her longing to be a separate person, and her terror of that longing; her...
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pp. 113-124 It was a highly unusual symptom, I was told. It was so unusual that Janet Meltzer, the psychotherapist Grace had been seeing since “the problems”—as Grace always referred to what had happened the year before—had never encountered it, so unusual that there were...
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pp. 125-136 If this had been a science fair project, I would have lost points for the small, haphazard sample, and for my exclusive concentration on literary and artistic types. (I knew this because I was one of the judges—by dint of an undergraduate degree in chemistry, a subject...
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pp. 137-143 The neurobiologist Paul Grobstein’s ideas about how unconsciousness and consciousness work together are based on the principle that the human brain is “bipartite,” by which he means not only that “there is a meaningful distinction between ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ aspects...
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pp. 144-150 My daughter is eighteen—halfway to nineteen—as I write these last pages. Time flies on paper. Of course, times flies anywhere. It hardly seems possible that I began making notes toward this essay when she was only eleven years old, when it was still diffi cult for her to be...
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