Women dreaming around marriage : a transpersonal study of personal narratives, group dreamwork, image and archetype

This thesis demonstrates how eight participants in two dreamgroups, meeting over six years, explored aspects of self-identity, change and transformation in the context of their own personal dreaming and shared dreamgroup processes. The thesis provides a rationale and argument for engagement with group dreamwork processes, as an appropriate medium of critical social/cultural inquiry, as well as for personal psycho-spiritual exploration. An initial pilot project involved four women in a short-term eight week dreamgroup process. Subsequently, two dreamgroups made up of mature-age women, who had experienced a long-term marriage, were formed. The guiding questions of the study were concerned with exploring what kept the participants in marriage or what prompted the urge to remarry? How did the participants reflect on the choices they were making? How were the experiences of the participants similar or different? To what extent did the women consider cultural conditioning as having been prescriptive or valuable? The participants also considered how they would create change, and how they would locate their visionary selves? The study is grounded in a qualitative research conceptual framework. The methodological approach used within the study is a blended heuristic and organic method of inquiry. The heuristic component is based on a personal, imaginal phenomenological method of inquiry. The organic approach draws on feminist fields of study, phenomenology and co-participatory research. The focus in the organic inquiry approach is on narratives and the ‘telling of stories’. It becomes both the method and subject of inquiry. The narratives of the dreamgroups recount the personal dreaming of individual participants. In these dreamgroup narratives, the personal stories, dreams and emergent themes and symbols are interwoven with the group story. Four central themes emerged through the personal and group work: letting go: restor(y) ing the feminine; integrating the masculine and feminine; living through image and metaphor. These themes are discussed and reflected upon, in relationship to the transformative potential for the participants, and personal and social relevance. As a means of reflection and creative synthesis, a questionnaire and a series of semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants