The Dream as an Emergent Phenomenon: A Lecture With Steve Zemmelman

How might one enter the mysterious world of dreams?  What might we make of the differences in how a dream is experienced when it is happening, when it is told, and when it is heard?  What opportunities and limits are there that emerge in the space between the dreamer and the listener? How does the context that holds dreamer and listener shape how the meaning of the dream is understood?  In tonight’s lecture and tomorrow’s workshop, the world of working with dreams will be deconstructed through a lens that integrates perspectives from analytical psychology, relational psychoanalysis, and hermeneutic phenomenology.

These avenues provide us a way of being in relation to dreams, which follows images and emotion while recognizing that the meaning embedded within dreams is paradoxically both discovered and created in the dialogue between the dreamer and the listener.  Central to this approach is the dynamism of the ego-self axis, the fulcrum around which dreams revolve. 

This lecture will dip into the history of working with dreams in ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Native American sources, as well as Freud’s approach to the dream and Jung’s theory related to understanding dreams.  We will touch on recent advances in studies of the brain and applications of AI to dreams and dreaming.

Steve Eliezer Zemmelman, Ph.D., is an analyst, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry in the Child and Adolescent Training Program at the University of California at San Francisco, and an adjunct professor at the Pacifica Graduate Institute.  He is an analyst member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco and the Interregional Society of Jungian Analysts.  Dr. Zemmelman maintains a private practice in Berkeley and San Francisco.  He has taught locally and internationally and published on topics including the analytic relationship, Erich Neumann, Jung and Judaism, and the Coen Brothers.