Download Defending Symbolic Convergence Theory From an Imaginary Gunn

Quarterly Journal of Speech
Vol. 89, No. 4, November 2003, pp. 366–372
Defending Symbolic Convergence Theory From an
Imaginary Gunn
Ernest G. Bormann, John F. Cragan, and Donald C. Shields
I
n what follows, we defend symbolic convergence theory (SCT) from Joshua Gunn’s
recent criticisms.1 Gunn calls for the creation of a new post-humanist, -Marxist,
-Freudian approach to rhetorical criticism that would combine literary, critical, and
psychoanalytic methods in a new “popular imaginary” paradigm.2 While urging acceptance of his new paradigm, Gunn advances three major criticisms of SCT.3 To respond
to them, it is important to lay out a general stance from which to defend SCT.4
Gunn’s criticisms do not evolve out of any rhetorical or social scientific research on
SCT that he conducted himself. Instead, his ideas flow from a critical theory stance
developed by other post-modernist writers.5 Gunn does not refer to the main body of
SCT research that would blunt his critique.6 Long ago Bormann established the
theoretical basis for using SCT, a general theory, to critique a special communication
theory. He reasoned that a general theory is grounded in social science research studies
and is timeless, whereas special communication theories are time-bound, transitory
rhetorical visions.7 Shields, for example, showed that the common ground between SCT
and a special communication theory is that SCT explains the special theory as style
specific and, thus, ephemeral. His critique of the critical autoethnography special theory
demonstrates that Gunn’s indictments of SCT (presented as contradictions or Gordian
Knots) can simply be cut, à la Alexander the Great, because as a general theory, SCT
explains any special communication theory as another rhetorical vision.8 Gunn espouses
a nascent rhetorical vision in which post-modern rhetoricians will develop a paradigm
called the popular imaginary, which is similar to Castoriadis’s concept of the social
imaginary as modified through Althusser’s thinking on ideology and psychoanalysis,
as a replacement.9 We choose not to participate in his vision; thus, we untie each
knot.
Gordian Knot 1: SCT is Ontologically and Paradigmatically Inconsistent
SCT is alleged to be ontologically and paradigmatically inconsistent because it
maintains a humanistic rhetor while advocating a de-centered, post-modern, coconstruction of reality via publicly shared fantasies. Gunn views SCT as a bridge
between modern and post-modern paradigms, as a forerunner of post-modern critical
rhetorical theory that is in decline because it retains a modern ontology of humanism
while espousing a post-modern, de-centered co-construction of symbolic reality. Gunn
is mistaken on many levels. The first is that SCT is in decline with “diminished
popularity” owing to “a number of internal contradictions” (50).
If by decline Gunn means popularity, he is mistaken. Scores of SCT-based
articles have been published. Their appearance has been relatively constant over 30
years, and the number of fields using SCT is expanding. At this writing, the professional
Copyright 2003, National Communication Association
DOI:10:80/0033563032000160990
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articles and books exceed 485. Julie Kendall, for example, used SCT to examine
chairs’ “Boiler Plate” for corporate rhetorical visions.10 Brad Jackson, another business professor, published a book in which he described management gurus as participating in three SCT rhetorical visions (righteous, social, and pragmatic).11 Many
early SCT studies were in political and other applied communication areas, and
they continue.12 Leena Saarinen of Helsinki, Finland, recently used SCT to study the
group dynamics and rhetorical vision of an imagined community in cyberspace.13
“Rhetorical vision” has entered the lexicon of journalists and has been used to evaluate
national research guidelines.14 Even critical theorists, such as Omar Swartz, have turned
recently to SCT to do cultural criticism.15 Gunn’s report of SCT’s demise is greatly
exaggerated.
Gunn’s claim about paradigm contradiction is only valid if one accepts paradigm
purity as a basis for evaluation.16 We do not. SCT has been classified and re-classified
as a hybrid theory via many paradigmatic schemas. Initially, SCT’s creators described
it as a message-centered theory that displayed elements of a humanistic paradigm while
being part of a social scientific paradigm.17
Gunn classifies rhetorical theories into three paradigms—pre-modern, modern, and
post-modern—using Richard Kearney’s genealogy.18 He then advances a fourth
paradigm—the popular imaginary. The genealogy metaphor (fantasy type), however,
changes the argument. Through the idea of genealogy, Gunn is not comparing equally
valid paradigms on a parallel plane; rather, he presents them vertically as if one
generation begets the next. Kearney, too, advances a fourth generation that he labels
the ethical imaginary; for Gunn, it is the popular imaginary. The point both writers
make is obvious. Generations die off and make way for new generations; however, this
spawning fantasy type is invalid because theories do not die off over time. Aristotle’s
rhetorical theory, for example, did not decline; it is used presently as a basis for criticism
in many communication classes and remains a vibrant means for doing rhetorical
criticism. The same is true for SCT.
Paradigmatic schemas are always a post-hoc activity.19 One problem with such
post-hoc analysis is that paradigmatic boundaries end up looking quite permeable
because there are always theories that fit comfortably in more than one paradigm. That
is often mistakenly taken as evidence that there is something wrong with a theory rather
than that the paradigmatic sorting system is flawed. We suggest that Joshua Gunn has
made this mistake. Thus, it is of little consequence to say that SCT is a hybrid theory
bridging modern and post-modern paradigms.
Gordian Knot 2: SCT’s Freudian Fantasies are Deceptive
Gunn claims that SCT’s Freudian roots preclude prediction because fantasies are
always deceptive. Gunn believes that SCT’s advocates have failed to refute Mohrmann’s
charge that fantasy themes are always deceptive whether in the subconscious, as in
Freud’s theory, or in the conscious fantasies of SCT. Gunn extends Mohrmann’s
argument by saying that those using SCT cannot divine the presence of motives in
large groups of people based on the fantasy theme analysis of a subjective critic.
Mohrmann has it wrong and so has Gunn. SCT researchers have repeatedly predicted individual behavior on the basis of large quantitative studies, thereby demonstrating the presence of meaning, emotion, value, and motive for action in the
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rhetoric, that is, in the symbolic structures of fantasy, fantasy type, rhetorical vision, and
saga.20
Bormann has long maintained that “fantasy theme analysis as a humanistic method
of rhetorical criticism when combined with the general theory of communication
(symbolic convergence) … provides a way for unifying the humanistic and social
scientific studies of rhetoric and communication.”21 In a 1994 defense of SCT, we
detailed the social scientific methods and research findings that demonstrated
empirically that fantasies chain-out across large groups of people and that people act
on the meanings, emotions, motives, and values of the rhetorical visions in which
they participate.22 By ignoring the social scientific studies, Gunn overlooks the
evidence that fantasy themes may be identified accurately and established simultaneously as being present within large groups of people and directly linked to their
behavior as individuals.23
In addition to ignoring the social scientific basis for fantasy theme analysis (FTA),
Gunn does little to make his case for the deceptive nature of rhetorical fantasies. His
attack on FTA is made indirectly by arguing that Freud’s psychoanalytic method cannot
accurately analyze dreams. Gunn’s citation from Freud that dreams are deceptive and
undecipherable because of “concealing actual motives in the language of myth and
symbol” is itself deceptive and weakens his indirect argument (50). Gunn quotes from
the Strachey translation of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams:
The dream-thoughts and the dream-content are presented to us like two versions of the same
subject matter in two different languages. Or more properly, the dream-content seems like
a [translation] of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression … The dream-thoughts
are immediately comprehensible, as soon as we have learnt them. The dream-content, on the
other hand, is expressed as it were in a pictographic script, the characters of which have to
be transposed individually into the language of the dream-thoughts. If we attempted to read
these characters according to their pictorial value instead of according to their symbolic
relation, we should clearly be led into error.24
The bracketed material is not in the original.25 Gunn has substituted “translation” for
the original word “transcript.” The difference, perhaps, is not great; however, reinsertion of the omitted material is telling to Gunn’s argument. That sentence—with
the missing material replaced in italics—from Strachey reads: “Or more properly, the
dream-content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of
expression whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover by comparing the original
and the translation. The dream-thoughts are immediately comprehensible, as soon as we
have learnt them.”26 Thus, for Freud, dream interpretation is not deceptive. One
comprehends the dream’s meaning through comparison just as we are analyzing Gunn’s
claim through comparison of these two scripts.27
SCT is unaffected by Freud except to the extent that Gunn misuses him.28 As we
have noted elsewhere, rhetorical fantasies are not Freudian fantasies,29 and the Freudian
vocabulary is not SCT’s vocabulary. A conscious fantasy, visibly present in the stuff
we call communication, is not the same as a Freudian subconscious fantasy. Freud’s
theory of dreams is different SCT. The Freudian psychoanalytic method of dream
interpretation differs from fantasy theme analysis. Rhetorical motives differ from
Freud’s subconscious desires. Rhetorical fantasies are not deceptive; they are discoverable through fantasy theme analysis. They can be translated because meaning, emotion,
value, and motive for action are present in the communication, not hidden in individual
psyches.
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Gordian Knot 3: SCT is a Deficient Theory of Invention
Gunn claims that SCT is an incomplete theory of invention because it treats
imagination as a form of suasory communication and because SCT only considers
conscious creativity.30 Gunn indicates that his objective is to negotiate meaning for the
concepts of invention and imagination. He believes the discipline will benefit if
rhetoricians consider the imaginary (imagination) as a psychoanalytic concept of the
collective unconscious, thus relieving disciplinary tension regarding the status of the
rhetorical agent. Gunn says:
Reading the evolution of rhetorical theory through the imaginary helps to highlight a general
unwillingness to let go of the Cartesian ego, the autonomous, humanist subject who claims
mastery over the material world in conscious thought, in favor of a more contingent and
fragmented understanding of individual subjectivity, community, and world (41–2).
Gunn believes SCT was “derailed by misjudgments concerning the role of the unconscious in rhetorical invention” (42). He believes imagination was part of the rhetorical
canon of memory, then shifted to style, and then emerged as part of the concept of
invention. Gunn suggests that “the key limitation of fantasy theme analysis was that
symbolic convergence was defended as an entirely conscious endeavor” (52). Finally,
Gunn asserts: “[U]ltimately, symbolic convergence is a theory of invention that posits
the collective imaginary as the principal and primary locus of suasive movement” (49).
SCT is not a theory of invention. Invention is not a meta-theoretical concept that can
house general theories of communication such as SCT; rather, invention is a concept
that comes from (neo-)Aristotelian theory. If Gunn wants to reinvent the canon of
invention, we invite him to do so, but he should not take a concept from one theory and
try to subsume a general theory in it, which elevates invention to the metatheoretical plane and is nonsensical. Conversely, SCT is a general theory of communication, but invention is not one of its concepts.31
Gunn is convinced that without a psychoanalytic explanation for the imaginary that
is consistent with the work of Althusser and Castoriadis, SCT is fatally flawed because
of its reliance on a conscious agent. As Gunn states, SCT’s researchers have “refused
to relinquish the romantic, creative productive imagination, which led to a number of
internal contradictions that commentators and detractors were quick to recognize” (50).
It is not a contradiction for SCT to posit fully conscious rhetors co-creating rhetorical
visions when SCT’s grounding research provides a detailed explanation of how this
creative process works. The essence of SCT’s research base is a theoretical explanation
of how multiple rhetors use their conscious imaginations to create symbolic realities
(rhetorical visions). This rhetorical process only appears contradictory if one lives in a
non-permeable paradigm schema that characterizes human endeavor as pre-modern,
modern, and post-modern and holds that rhetorical visions exist in the subconscious
minds of rhetors. SCT offers a rich explanation of how rhetors use non-rational and
rational components of language as they creatively produce their own symbolic reality.32
SCT’s research program has always indicated that consciousness-creating, -raising,
and -sustaining is a conscious, open, interactive process, directly observable in the
rhetoric which, in turn, is wholly explainable and produces reliable predictions of
human behavior. As SCT scholars, we have been working with an autonomous,
humanistic rhetor for 33 years without finding research evidence that would lead to a
different view of the rhetor’s imaginative process.33 A fair reading of the SCT literature
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leads to the conclusion that there is no reason to believe, as Gunn asserts, that rhetorical
fantasizing is taking place in an individual’s subconscious.34
Notes
Ernest G. Bormann is a professor emeritus, Department of Communication Studies, University of Minnesota; John F. Cragan is a
professor emeritus, Department of Communication, Illinois State University, and visiting professor of communication, University of St.
Thomas; Donald C. Shields is a professor emeritus, Department of Communication, University of Missouri — St. Louis and adjunct
professor, Communication Studies Department, University of Missouri — Kansas City.
1Joshua Gunn, “Refiguring Fantasy: Imagination and Its Decline in U.S. Rhetorical Studies,” Quarterly Journal
of Speech 89 (2003): 41–59. Subsequent references are in parentheses in the text.
2As Gunn indicates, the essay is derived from his dissertation, Rhetorics of Darkness: Modern Occultism and the Popular
Imaginary, Vols. 1–2, University of Minnesota, 2002. There Gunn identifies his critical rhetoric approach variously
as theory, perspective, and “popular imaginary” paradigm. Gunn says: “I argue for what I term an ‘imaginary
perspective of rhetoric,’ a wedding of Marxian and psychoanalytic modes of criticism that attempts to preserve a
philosophical commitment to a materialism while simultaneously defining suasion as a mental phenomenon … The
ultimate aim of this section of the study is to develop a theory of rhetorical criticism that best reflects my theoretical
commitments” (37–8).
3Gunn develops these criticisms extensively in a 2100-word section labeled: “The Fruits and Failures of the Force
of Fantasy.” See “Refiguring,” 48–52.
4For a recent literature review, see Ernest G. Bormann, John F. Cragan, and Donald C. Shields, “Three
Decades of Developing, Grounding, and Using Symbolic Convergence Theory (SCT),” in Communication Yearbook
25, ed. William B. Gudykunst (Yahweh, NJ: Erlbaum, 2001), 271–313.
5See Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis,” Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 91–111;
Cornelius Castoriadis, The Castoriadis Reader, ed. and trans. David A. Curtis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); and John
McGowan, Postmodernism and Its Critics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
6Bormann, Cragan, and Shields, in “Three Decades,” 271–313, review scores of studies supporting SCT. Gunn
refers to just nine publications about SCT (two of those are Gerald P. Mohrmann’s 1982 criticisms).
7Ernest G. Bormann, Communication Theory (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1980), see esp., 4–5, 30–34,
64–71, 74–76, 86–89, 91–97, 168–169, 195–196, and 243–247 for an understanding of special communication
theories.
8Donald C. Shields, “Symbolic Convergence and Special Communication Theories: Sensing and Examining
Dis/Enchantment with the Theoretical Robustness of Critical Autoethnography,” Communication Monographs 67
(2000): 392–421, esp. 407–11. We provide an “analysis of how a general theory, symbolic convergence, can explain
the inception, development, and nature of special theories.” See Ernest G. Bormann, John F. Cragan, and Donald
C. Shields, “In Defense of Symbolic Convergence Theory: A Look at the Theory and Its Criticisms after Two
Decades,” Communication Theory 4 (1994): 259–94. The quote is on 287. For the difference between general and
special theories, see 265–8.
9For example, Castoriadis distinguishes between a person’s social imaginary as a socially instituted imaginary (the
appearance of freedom) and a person’s radical imaginary (that seeks autonomy). See Castoriadis, Reader; and
Cornelius Castoriadis, World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, ed. and trans.
David A. Curtis (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). Also see Louis Althusser, “Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben
Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86; and Louis Althusser, Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud
and Lacan, ed. Olivier Corpet and Francois Matheron, trans. Jeffrey Mechlam (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996). As Gunn uses popular imaginary, for some readers it may resemble a media-created rhetorical vision.
However, we see little benefit in changing the name of a long-standing grounded technical concept like rhetorical
vision in the SCT technical vocabulary to a term like popular imaginary or social imaginary, especially given the
wide variation in what is meant by social imaginary and the lack of grounding social science research to support
such a concept.
10 Julie E. Kendall, “Good and Evil in the Chairmen’s ‘Boiler Plate’: An Analysis of Corporate Visions of the
1970s,” Organization Studies 14 (1993): 571–92.
11Brad Jackson, Management Gurus and Management Fashions: A Dramatistic Inquiry (London: Routledge, 2001).
12For example, see Janis L. Edwards and Huey Wong-Chen, “The First Lady/First Wife in Editorial Cartoons:
Rhetorical Visions through Gendered Lenses,” Women’s Studies in Communication 23 (2000): 367–92; Susan S.
Huxman, “Perfecting the Rhetorical Vision of Woman’s Rights: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anna Howard Shaw and
Carrie Chapman Catt,” Women’s Studies in Communication 23 (2000): 307–37; Rita Csapo-Sweet and Donald C.
Shields, “Explicating the Saga Component of Symbolic Convergence Theory: The Case of Serbia’s Radio B92 in
Cyberspace,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17 (2000): 318–33; James D. Hester, “Creating the Future:
Apocalyptic Rhetoric in 1 Thessalonians,” Religion and Theology 7 (2000): 192–212; Larry J. Whatule,
“Communication as an Aid to Resocialization: A Case Study of a Men’s Anger Group,” Small Group Research 31
(2000): 424–47; Valerie Terry, “Lobbying: Fantasy, Reality or Both? A Health Care Public Policy Case Study,”
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1 (2001): 266–80; William L. Benoit, Andrew A. Klyukovski, John P. McHale, and David
Airne, “A Fantasy Theme Analysis of Political Cartoons on the Clinton-Lewinsky-Starr Affair,” Critical Studies in
Media Communication 18 (2001): 377–95; Michael G. Moran, “A Fantasy-Theme Analysis of Arthur Barlowe’s 1554
Discourse on Virginia: The First English Commercial Report Written about North America from Direct Experience,”
Technical Communication Quarterly 11 (2002): 31–59; and Donatella Campus, “Leaders, Dreams, and Journeys: Italy’s
New Political Communication,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 7 (2002): 171–92.
13Leena Saarinen, “Imagined Community and Death,” Digital Creativity 13 (2002): 53–61.
14For example, see Michael Kramer, “Two Visions, 21 Minutes Apart,” Time 139 (13 April 1992): 28. For an
online piece using SCT to evaluate academic research funding in England, see Glynis Cousin, “It’s the WAY THEY
TELL IT: The research assessment exercise explained in the light of rhetorical criticism” (2001): 1–11, available from
http://home.edu.coventry.ac.uk/edu037/magleddj.htm [retrieved 27 March 2003].
15Omar Swartz, The View from On the Road: The Rhetorical Vision of Jack Kerouac (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press, 2000). Also see Joshua Gunn, “The West Wing,” The Atlantic Monthly (June, 2001): 10; this letter
to the editor is also available from http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/06/letters.htm [retrieved 4 February
2003]. For another work that uses SCT as a rhetorical theory to do cultural criticism, see Cheryl R.
Jorgensen-Earp, “The Transfiguring Sword”: The Just War of the Women’s Social and Political Union (Tuscaloosa, AL:
University of Alabama Press, 1997).
16Corman and Poole’s recent book about the paradigm wars in organizational communication points to the folly
of trying to classify theories or theorists as belonging exclusively to the post-positive, interpretive, or critical
paradigm. Steven R. Corman and Marshall S. Poole, eds., Perspectives on Organizational Communication: Finding Common
Ground (New York: Guilford, 2000). See especially, 48, 59, 154, and 223.
17Ernest G. Bormann, “Rhetoric as a Way of Knowing: Ernest Bormann and Fantasy Theme Analysis,” in
Rhetoric of Western Thought, 3rd ed., ed. James L. Golden, Goodwin F. Berquist, and William E. Coleman (Dubuque:
Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 1983), 431–49, esp. 433. As early as 1982, Bormann noted that “the methodology
required to integrate public opinion polling and marketing research with symbolic convergence theory is in the
process of being worked out,” and he referred the reader to two sources. See Ernest G. Bormann, “Fantasy Theme
Analysis of the Television Coverage of the Hostage Release and the Reagan Inaugural,” Quarterly Journal of Speech
68 (1982): 133–45. Quotation is on 143.
18For comparison, see Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture (London: Hutchinson, 1988), especially “Introduction,” 1–33. Kearney writes: “The story of imagination needs to be told. Like all
species under threat of extinction, the imagination requires to be recorded in terms of its genealogy: its conceptual
genesis and mutations.” Quotation is on 6.
19Bormann, Communication Theory, 65–8; John F. Cragan and Donald C. Shields, Symbolic Theories in Applied
Communication: Bormann, Burke, and Fisher (Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1995), 18–9; and Cragan and Shields,
Understanding Communication Theory: The Communicative Forces for Human Action (Boston, MA: Alleyn & Bacon, 1998),
16–7.
20See several social scientific studies following the sections entitled, “Using the Theory to Investigate Organizational Communication” and “Using the Theory to Conduct Marketing Research” in Applied Communication Research:
A Dramatistic Approach, ed. John F. Cragan and Donald C. Shields (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1981),
217–18 and 311, respectively. For reviews of other studies, see Bormann, Cragan, and Shields, “Three Decades,”
271–313; or Cragan and Shields, Symbolic Theories, 29–59, 161–90.
21Bormann, “Rhetoric as a Way of Knowing,” 433.
22Bormann, Cragan, and Shields, “Defense,” 269–75.
23See Notes 6 and 20, above.
24Gunn, “Refiguring,” 51.
25Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 311–2.
26Strachey’s translation of Freud, Interpretation, 311–2.
27Strachey’s translation of Freud, Interpretation, 311–2 compared to Gunn’s misquotation of Freud in
“Refiguring,” 51.
28Importantly, Gunn’s problem with understanding Freud begins with his selection of the Strachey translation
about which a number of Freudian scholars have complained. See, for example, Jeffrey M. Masson, Against Therapy:
Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1988), 48. The
Freud-approved translation was made by Brill, who indicates that an analyst is interpreting the symbolic relation
between the dream per se and the psychoanalytic problem the dream represents and not the pictorial value of each
drawing in the rebus. See Dr. A. A. Brill’s translation from the German of Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of
Dreams (New York: Random House, 1994; originally translated and published in 1913), 174–5.
29See Bormann, Cragan, and Shields, “Defense,” 269–75; and their “Three Decades,” 299; also see, Cragan and
Shields, Symbolic Theories, 193–4; and their Communication Theory, 118–9.
30SCT is not a suasory theory. Brock, Scott, and Chesebro note that the term “suasory” is code for a politically
persuasive ideological theory through which criticism is directed toward explicit political ends. See Methods of
Rhetorical Criticism: A Twentieth-Century Perspective, 3rd ed., ed. Bernard L. Brock, Robert L. Scott, and James W.
Chesebro (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 21.
31For a discussion of levels of theoretical vocabulary, see Bormann, Cragan, and Shields, “Defense,” 284–87; and
Cragan and Shields, Communication Theory, 6–8.
32Ernest G. Bormann, John F. Cragan, and Donald C. Shields, “An Expansion of the Rhetorical Vision
Journal of Public Affairs
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Component of the Symbolic Convergence Theory: The Cold War Paradigm Case,” Communication Monographs 63
(1996): 1–27.
33Notwithstanding the ideological turn in U.S. rhetorical scholarship, many critical theorists and cultural critics
view rhetors as autonomous and rhetoric as co-created. Although we are indebted to Herb Simons for this
argument (he saw it as highly ironic and contradictory in the writings of Gaonker) and to Karlyn Campbell for
reminding us of it, we believe the widespread practice merely highlights the triviality of seeing mixed paradigms
in another’s work. See Herbert W. Simons, “Review Essay: Rhetorical Hermeneutics and the Project of
Globalization,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 86–100.
34Bormann, Knutson, and Musolf, for example, used Q-type factor analysis to answer the question, “What
accounts for fantasy sharing?” They indicated that by “building on the work of Cragan and Shields and McIlwraith
and Schallow, we suggest that one possible explanation for the tendency for people to share fantasies lies either
in a learned (nurtured) or a congenital (natural) preference for certain kinds of narratives. For example, an
individual might prefer narratives that are sad or violent or bizarre science fiction. Another individual might prefer
non-fiction narratives.” They report factor analytic data that indicates in a “full-headed” way “that people
imaginatively generate their own fantasies” (272). They also report that the generated fantasies reflect either a
righteous, social, or pragmatic cast, and they confirm that this finding holds true cross-culturally by comparing
their U.S. results to those of a similar study in Japan. See Ernest G. Bormann, Roxann L. Knutson, and Karen
Musolf, “Why Do People Share Fantasies? An Empirical Investigation of a Basic Tenet of the Symbolic
Convergence Communication Theory,” Communication Studies 48 (1997): 254–76; and Ernest G. Bormann and
Yoshihisa Itaba, “Why Do People Share Fantasies? An Empirical Investigation of the Symbolic Convergence
Theory in a Sample of Japanese Subjects,” Human Communication Studies 20 (1992): 1–25. Also, their findings are
consistent with those of non-Freudian psychologists. See, for example, Robert D. McIlwraith and John R.
Schallow, “Adult Fantasy Life and Patterns of Media Use,” Journal of Communication 33 (1983): 78–91.