Chapter 6

Reflexivity and the psyche as a dynamic system

 

 

 

Part I provides a detailed picture of students' shift from cognitive control, where certain emotional feelings and parts of the personality are repressed or in conflict, towards a more open, flexible, embodied, and agentic self-experience, whether for writing, learning, or simply for being. As I have shown, this shift is evident not only in students' conscious descriptions, but also comes through less conscious metaphors and imagery, especially in their creative life writing. The opening-up of space for the imagination and the growing ability to manage it is visible, for example, in Simon's change of metaphor for his sense of self as a writer from closed, unspeakable psychic territory ...

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