Maladaptive Daydreaming and the Wellcome Collection
Wellcome Collection is a museum and library in London, they are “a free museum and library exploring health and human experience”. Their online presence includes a page on ‘stories’, “We tell stories about health and human experience. Our words and pictures make connections, provoke new thinking and share lived experiences,” and recently featured a story, by Laura Grace Simpkins, on Maladaptive Daydreaming and the feminization of daydreaming.
Ever since Odysseus’s men partook of the lotus, daydreaming has been negatively feminised. When the crew members join in with the tribe’s lotus lunch, they take themselves out of the sphere of male labour and reduce themselves to female domesticity and ‘unmindfulness’. In another mythological lotus story, that of the Buddha transfixed upon its petals, the lotus is a vehicle for meditation: a practice associated with male spiritual self-discovery.
Meditation, what men do, is a virtue. Daydreaming, what women or emasculated men do, is a vice.
https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/YvylxBAAACMA–Lg
To read the full article click HERE