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September Meeting w September 13, 2020 from 2-5 PM w 

To RSVP for this event please email Elaine Mannon 
at outreach@sfapc.org  OR Register on Eventbrite:

Join Zoom Meeting (For dial-in phone numbers see information below the event description)

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88339924730?pwd=ZmtGd0FVS3d3Tm9XSDZnS0txNTByQT09

 

Meeting ID: 883 3992 4730

Password: 579325

Vocational Dreams and Synchronistic Phenomena
with 
Steven Herrman, PhD, MFT

What are vocational dreams? Who has had a vocational dream? Probably everyone in Jungian analysis, or who has studied Jung deeply enough, has had a vocational dream of some kind or another, whether one is aware of it or not. Vocational dreams serve a pragmatic function of clarification in the domain of practical career decision making or confirmation of a life’s calling. Steven will be speaking about how dreams can become part of your psychophysical experience, your actual vocational reality. He will draw upon ideas from Jungian psychology and will focus particularly on C. G. Jung’s theory of synchronicity. When one taps into a vocational dream at a deep enough level it can touch a corresponding chord in the transpersonal psyche, and when this happens, it may sometimes create a reshuffling of environmental events where things may begin to happen that are beyond probability and constellate instances of meaningful chance, or acausal coincidence.

Synchronicity is an acausal connecting principle in the universe that provides empirical evidence that there is a hidden correspondence between deep, underlying archetypal nuclei in the psyche and outer events that just happen to us and are sometimes baffling. They can startle us and leave us with a feeling of something numinous, something that leaves one feeling like there is a sense of the holy present, within and without. Jung used the term “numinous” during his seventh and last trip to the United States in his lectures on “Psychology and Religion” at Yale University in 1937 to clarify what he meant by religious experience. The presenter will offer various techniques for accessing the vocational archetype in the human psyche. 

 

Steven Herrmann, PhD, MFT, is an analyst member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. He is the author of six books, over forty papers and several book chapters. Vocational dreams is a subject that has been very close to the presenter’s personal and professional interests for over forty years. He started studying vocational dreams by coincidence. When studying for his BA degree in “Depth Psychology and Religion” at U.C. Santa Cruz during the 1980-1982 school term, Steven taught Jung’s theories of dream interpretation to students who were in the process of trying to see if they could confirm their vocations through their dream life. The aim of the course “Birth of a Poet” was to look at dreams over time and see if the student could verify his or her vocation by examining calling symbols in their dream journals. The class was taught by the poet-in-residence, William Everson and Steven served as the poet’s TA. Steven taught for Bill and later they continued to deepen their conversations about the subject of vocation. These conversations became the transcript for the book Steven co-authored with Bill: William Everson: The Shaman’s Call. Steven has a private practice in Montclair, Oakland, where he sees children, adolescents, couples, and adults.