Can stimulus-incorporation and emotion-assimilation theorists revive the continuity hypothesis they deprived of cognitive meaning? A reply to Jenkins.

Jenkins’ (2018) attempt to defend the theorists I snidely called concept snatchers (based on a 1978 movie on “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers”) is beside the point: They did not take or steal ideas. They presented their version of the continuity hypothesis “without any mention of the original meaning of the concept . . .” (Domhoff, 2017, p. 15). They buried the original ideas by ignoring them, which is what led to the critique, not simply their adoption of the term. By talking about the everyday usage of the term continuity, Jenkins (2018) exculpated these theorists from a deficiency in their scholarship: a failure to address the full scientific literature in their articles. Moreover, the word “continuity” was not used in the study of dreams (the relevant usage domain) in the 6 decades before Bell and Hall (1971) proposed it. A search of PsycINFO for both “continuity” and “dream” anywhere in any record between 1806 and 1970 found only four relevant records. All of them appeared 60 years or more before the concept of a continuity hypothesis was introduced, only one comes close to it in substance, and none had any later impact on the cognitively based continuity hypothesis. Nor were there any mentions of “continuity hypothesis” and “dream” before 1971. The continuity of personal concerns between waking thought and dreaming is now well-established (Domhoff, 2018, Chapters 3 and 4). Incorporation theorists and emotion-assimilation theorists can gl...
Source: Dreaming - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research