Abstract
In this article I offer an overview of my doctoral dissertation, which studied the social imaginary of consumerism, and the psychological subjectivity it produces, through the dream - as both a leitmotif or thematic lens, and the empirical object of research. For such I employed an interdisciplinary exploratory outlook, whose theoretical framework first discusses the symbolic imaginaries (G. Durand) and their relations with the unconscious psyche, dream, imagination, and subjectivity (C. G. Jung), and then explores their relationships with consumption (Baudrillard, Bauman) and its semiotic imaginaries and ideology, focusing on the concepts of consumption dreams and dream-worlds of consumption. The main research aim was to explore how night dreams represent the colonization of subjectivity by the imaginary of consumerism. The method consisted in a multiple-case study in which each night dream was taken as a case and interpreted through Jungian hermeneutics. Findings stress that night dreams can offer a deep sociocultural critique; in them the imaginary of consumption appeared as a totalizing mass ideology engendering colonization of both symbolic imaginaries and the subject and her unconscious psyche. Conclusions emphasize such colonization as an anthropological mutation - the progressive commodification and dehumanization of the subject.
Highlights
In this article I offer an overview of my doctoral dissertation, which studied the social imaginary of consumerism, and the psychological subjectivity it produces, through the dream - as both a leitmotif or thematic lens, and the empirical object of research
Consumption has arguably become the main definer of our culture, the chief basis of the social order (Baudrillard, 1968/1996; Poster, 2001): we are living in the age of consumerism (Baudrillard, 1970/1998)
As the polysemic leitmotif of this work, “dream” appears in three main senses: (a) as night dream – the symbolic, natural product of the unconscious psyche that reveals its discourse on the dreamer’s subjectivity and on culture; (b) as consumption dreams – defined as the desires, fantasies, and daydreams about commodities and consumption, they correspond to the irrational fetish or ideology, the social significations fabricated and circulated as a social imaginary through the logic of advertising, which engineer collective desire and imagination and underpin the functioning of the whole system of consumption
Summary
In this article I offer an overview of my doctoral dissertation, which studied the social imaginary of consumerism, and the psychological subjectivity it produces, through the dream - as both a leitmotif or thematic lens, and the empirical object of research.
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