The Role of Reverie in Psychological Transformation: A Lecture With Joseph Cambray

In revaluing of the place of imagination in psychological transformation, we will turn to an often-neglected element, our capacity for reverie. Exploring the history of the way reveries have been presented reveals some archetypal features, including a Dionysian aspect, but also the dismissed, not to be taken seriously (in alchemy, the stone the builders reject), which can now be reclaimed.

After exploring a set of examples of types of reveries, we will look at their use in psychological practices. This will include Jung’s incorporation of reveries into his Red Book, as precursors to active imaginations.  Contemporary work indicates there may be a synchronistic core to many reverie experiences, which offer a new means of engaging unconscious processes that may not be readily available otherwise. Cultivating the intuitive function to tolerate and explore reveries through “disciplined distraction” provides an explicit pathway into this realm. Various examples from the presenter’s experience will be offered to help clarify how this operates in practice.

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Reverie and the Imagination in Jungian Analysis and Beyond by Joseph Cambray

Joseph Cambray, Ph.D. is a Jungian analyst living in the Santa Barbara area of California. He is Past-President/CEO of Pacifica Graduate Institute; Past-President of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP), and has served as the U.S. Editor for The Journal of Analytical Psychology. He was a faculty member at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, Center for Psychoanalytic Studies. Dr. Cambray is an internationally known teacher, consultant, and lecturer who has numerous publications, including a recent chapter in Confronting Death (2024) edited by Luis Moris and published by Chiron Press.