Active Imagination in Dream Art

7.5 CE contact hours for licensed NYS Social Workers, Psychoanalysts and Creative Arts Therapists.

Join us in a five-week Dream Art workshop and sculpt, draw, paint, dance, write, or compose music from the depths of psyche. Jungian analyst and two-time Gradiva Award winner Maria Taveras will conduct this workshop using the Zoom platform. Participants will translate an image from one of their own dreams or spontaneous images in any expressive form they feel conveys the intrinsic meaning of the image and learn the creative process that C.G. Jung calls “active imagination.” Taveras will guide participants with psyche’s expressions individually. This intimate experience will be a unique opportunity to become acquainted with the hidden knowledge that is possessed by the unconscious as sources of creativity that broadens and deepens their relationship with their inner life.

Maria Taveras describes the Dream Art process in her own art as a sculptor in this way:
My approach is drawn exclusively from my dreams and active imagination. My attention is focused on rendering the dream image in its likeness as it begins to develop in manifold ways while noting the emotions, voices, visions, moods, and gestures of the dream image that come up spontaneously or in an evolving mental picture of it. This gradually leads to a visual and verbal dialogue that takes place throughout the creative process, in the studio or not, while sculpting the dream image. This visual and verbal dialogue is a constant reverie of questions and reflections, in conversation with the image. The sculpture is, as it were, a “living symbol.”

This creative process opens the imagination and the heart to experience the channeling of divergent currents pulsing through the emotions. The challenge is psychic in nature – as the content that is being worked out progresses toward the final, formal manifestation of its essential destiny. The creative process slowly begins to bring into consciousness the experience of it as it metamorphoses in a deep and powerful way. At this point, it is difficult to know “who” or “what” is leading me or the sculpture, for the creative process takes on a life of its own. The visual and verbal dialogue is continuous all through the process. When the sculpted image is completed and externalized, my relationship to it shifts. The image is now a formal sculptural form endowed with the experiences of feeling my way through the image. The dream image has become a part of me consciously, and I begin to relate to it as a profoundly vital aspect of my own personality. I understand my sculpted dream images to be the pantheon of my psyche.

Learning Objectives:

Explain the importance of dreams in Jungian psychoanalysis: Jung’s methods of dream interpretation: The Creative Process of Form and Content in Active Imagination, Amplification, Individual Symbol Formation, and Individuation Process
State the difference between ancient religious and mythological notions about the source and purpose of dreams and modern psychological theories.
Discuss how dreaming has been depicted historically in art as a prophetic verbal and visual revelation from another dimension, which psychoanalysis now calls the unconscious.
Explain how artists over the centuries have rendered in impressively profound images the phenomenon of dreaming as an activity essential to the transformation and expansion of consciousness.
By painting dreams of their own in class, participants will directly embody the relation between art and psyche and then have an opportunity to share with other participants their uniquely personal experience of the creative process.

FACULTY

William Baker, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. He is currently on the faculty at the Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology at Yeshiva University, the William Alanson White Institute, and the Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts and serves as a member of the editorial staff at the Journal of Analytical Psychology.

Harry W. Fogarty, MDiv, PhD, LP, is a Jungian analyst in private practice in NYC. He is a faculty member of the Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts and a former Lecturer in Psychiatry and Religion at Union Theological Seminary.

Ilona Melker, LCSW, is a Jungian Psychoanalyst and Certified Sandplay Therapist. She has taught and lectured at the C.G. Jung Foundation and at national conferences. She has contributed to professional journals. She is in private practice in Manhattan and Princeton, New Jersey.

Maria Taveras, LCSW, is a Jungian analyst in private practice in New York City. She is also an award-winning creator of Dream Art. She creates art from images in her own dreams and is the recipient of two Gradiva Awards from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis for her Dream Art. Her Dream Art has been exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Berkeley, London, Montreal, and Cape Town.

David Walczyk, EdD, LP, NCPsyA, is a Jungian analyst in private practice in NYC. He is a graduate of Columbia University and the C.G. Jung Institute of NY. He is an award-winning educator, award-winning designer, a writer, and public speaker. He has lectured both domestically and internationally and is on the faculty of New York University.

Sylvester Wojtkowski, PhD, is a Jungian analyst and clinical psychologist in private practice in New York City. He received his doctorate from the New School for Social Research.

CLOSED
5 consecutive Wednesdays
6:00 – 7:30 pm. Eastern Time, USA
Beginning October 6, 2021

Instructor: Maria Taveras, LCSW

Learning Objectives:

FACULTY

Program Information

PROGRAM COSTS

$150 per single-day program registration.
There are no scholarships available for this program.

TUITION

All 5-week courses are $175 for the general public and $150 for members.