Minding Dolls

Book excerpt: This book explores the symbolic relationship between the self and the object. Specifically, in terms of “my objectified being”, in which the original physical nature of the “thing” includes its being alive, but loses this phenomenological quality in a sense as one’s “own” personal meaning comes to imbue it. Here, the “thing” is a living, breathing human being that becomes an intimate manifestation of one’s own imagined experience of the “doll”. Integral to the morphing or shaping of this essentially private experience may be certain cognitively universal substrates such as archetypal patterns, as well as idealistic tendencies of that which is desired. Both of these may contribute to the shaping of one’s subjective experience of the “doll”. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers concerned with how cognition (including psychology and the brain, psychology and literature, psychology and art, and philosophy of mind) might relate specifically to understanding the subjective experience of the “doll”.