Wish I Were: Felt Pathways of the Self

The process of making meaning out of the symbols and circumstances of everyday surroundings is one that is often reduced to one-dimensional measurements and strictly linear arguments and logic. Such approaches try to create a cold, unbending science of an study that is by definition subjective. In this book, Linda Rogers endeavors to free educational psychology and semiotics from cognitive reductionism.

Wish I Were: Felt Pathways of the Self is a collection of stories which explores a semiotic approach to the factors involved in identity construction. Who am I? How has society contributed to the way I interpret events? How do signs and cultural symbols interact in the ever-evolving process of being? These are questions Linda and several other semioticians raise in this extraordinary volume of narratives that reflect the symbols of how we define ourselves.

This book fearlessly addresses such key topics as speech, symbols, ambiguity, hero identification, healing, gender, coherence, and communication, and how these various elements contribute to the transformation from vague self-concept into an integral and liberating identity.

Ethically principled positions such as those put forward by Rogers and her contributors currently have limited purchase in a world where trust, love, and collective struggle have been replaced by the imperatives of a technocratic society bent upon ecological destruction and economic exploitation. ... Therapists, educators, parents, and community workers would do well to follow Rogers lead in situating the self within the social and the social within the semiotic.