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Method And Its Ethical Implications

  • Writer: Karey Pohn
    Karey Pohn
  • Feb 28, 2023
  • 2 min read

It is only fitting that a dissertation with Hermes at heart is a theoretical dissertation using a hermeneutic method. Indeed, that is part of my method. I explore the texts and discover new understandings about the nature of play. My dissertation is a thematic dissertation, with play at the center, playfully combining scholarly insight and research with examples from popular culture. I play the cosmic game onward, in a most galumphant manner!


In mid-October 2003, while visioning my dissertation in a state of reverie, I playfully mused that I would love to turn in a one-line dissertation: www.dissertationtitle.com. At the time I was busy reading about different methodologies and had decided to begin with the notion of bricolage, thinking that it would be relatively straightforward, and thus a good place to begin—boy was I wrong! It seems that I was thrown a curve by Hermes and spent the next month and a half following the bouncing ball of bricolage. In December, I consulted the High-Priestess of Liminality, Dr. Helene Shulman Lorenz, herself a very Hermes-like person. After telling her several different things that I was considering, all of which she shot down, I told her of my musing and said: “What I’d really like to do is a website, then, while someone is reading along, they can click on a link and leave the dissertation, possibly never to return.” She beamed and told me that it was the only interesting thing that I had said and suggested that I do an artistic dissertation. And so here we are, after being tricked by Hermes into expanding my original vision I ended up crafting a new bricolage methodology and creating an artistic web-based dissertation of hypertext essays and images.


This is a theoretical dissertation, and there was no contact with individual human subjects, although I did use my own personal experiences in an imaginal, heuristic manner to complement and animate the subject, for how could a dissertation on play not include the imaginal? Romanyshyn and Goodchild (2003) have been instrumental in my thinking here and I was also informed by Bosnak’s (2003, cassette) “Embodied Dreamwork” and Abrams’s (1996) notion of the participatory and animate earth, as I engaged the stone and the imaginal realm as co-researchers.

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© 2005 - 2024 by Karey Pohn

Karey Pohn is not associated in any official way with the Walt Disney Company, its subsidiaries, or its affiliates. The official Disney site is available at www.disney.com. This web site cosmicplay.net is my dissertation for my PhD in Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute, www.pacifica.edu click here to see legal and copyright information

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