Haunting households, Heidegger, and holy ghosts: A psychology of the family within the economy of culture

This dissertation envisions the family as a work of culture. It considers the breakdown of the modern family to be symptomatic of the psychic condition of our cultural world. The approach derives from existential-phenomenology and archetypal psychology. These two disciplines together restore a sense of the imaginal dimension of the experiential world as the imaginative visibility of the anima mundi. They also allow one to see the poetics of culture as a psycho-poetics, a crafting of soul.; As a work within the discipline of cultural psychology, this study considers the family to be inextricably interwoven within the economy of the historical world. In so doing, it challenges the ideological assumptions of modern psychology which bifurcate reality into economic and non-economic, public and private, historical and a-historical spheres. There are two implications of this manner of envisioning the family. First, psychological reality is liberated from its privatized and non-economic conceptual confines. Second, economic exchanges are presented as a poetic crafting--in Heidegger's sense of poetry as measure--that fashions the qualitative forms of psychological life in its cultural manifestations.; In this interdisciplinary study, Homer, Shakespeare, and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) are read as economists who have articulated the poetic ground of the three distinct historical phases in the Western cultural economy. Homer's Odyssey presents an economy of gift-exchange; Shakespeare's King Lear articulates the emergence of a way of seeing that typifies the economy of commodities; and, finally, the poetry and autobiographical prose of H. D. are read as announcing an economy of the word as the poetic ground of postmodern dwelling. The dissertation considers the image of familial bonds within these distinct economies.