Saybrook Alumna Jacquie Lewis, PhD ’06 to Present Paper at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Humanistic Psychology, April 14-18, 2011
Moving Dreams Off the Bed and Onto the Couch: The Importance of Dreamwork when Working with the Whole Person
Bring a dream to this workshop! People spend roughly one third of their lives asleep. The average number of dreams that humans have each night is about four to six. Yet many humanistic therapists rarely, if ever, discuss their clients’ dreams with them. Why should this be the case?
Recent research strongly indicates that dreams reflect waking concerns and experiences. Sadly, and often, when a client presents a dream the therapist deflects the conversation to waking events in the person’s life or confesses to her client that she does not work with client dreams. Part of the reason for this is that therapists usually have not received adequate, if any, training on how to work with dreams in clinical settings. Unfortunately, the majority of graduate psychology schools in this country do not have even one class devoted to the topics of dreams, dreaming. and dreamwork. This seems odd when one reflects on the founding fathers of psychology Freud, Jung, and Adler, who recognized the importance of dreams.
This presentation will offer participants practical skills to work with dreams in clinical settings. Attendees will become familiar with the seven- step Ullman method and have the opportunity to work on a dream in a group to become familiar with the Ullman process.
This presentation will explore the value of working with dreams, while offering an addressing various humanistic approaches on how to work with clients when they bring dreams to the therapeutic setting. The dreamwork methods that will be discussed are: the Ullman method, the gestalt method, and the focusing method. Suggestions will be made on how to work with dreams both on an individual level and in a group setting.
Jacquie Lewis, PhD
Co-Director, Dream Studies Certificate Program
Saybrook University
[email protected]
https://dev.saybrook.edu/
http://www.jacquielewis.net/
http://lotusdream.org/