Dreamwork, anthropology and the caring professions: A cultural approach to dreamwork

This work combines recent developments in the study of the understanding of dreams in the fields of social anthropology and psychology, and aims to present a novel cultural approach to dreamwork for those in the caring professions. Based on an ethnographic study of author-led dreamwork groups in the UK, the book develops an analysis of dreams as a form of culturally-specific metaphorical thought and shows how group members made sense out of the nonsense of dream imagery. Their sense was developed through experiential groupwork methods such as gestalt, psychodrama and imagework, and was derived from the language of metaphor and a political, often feminist, analysis of life events.