The Healing Poison – Working With Nightmares

Part One of The Dream Seminar Series
Kenneth Kimmel, Jungian Psychoanalyst
About the Seminar
Ever-recurring terrors that leave one mute, paralyzed, suffocating, and helpless; ‘the guilt that lies in wait’; the dissociated hatred in the inner Medusa’s lethal Gaze—these are the expressions of psyche’s raw enigmatic truth–the dreaded dose of the poison that heals.
This brief workshop will offer tools needed to process the somatic, emotional, and imaginal experience ’embedded’ in the nightmare’s enigmatic terror. These process-oriented methods have been known to bring repressed and traumatic symptoms into symbolizing form. A ‘third’, reflecting capacity can emerge over time, bringing a greater cohesion to mind and body.
This therapy is contrary to methods that attempt to understand, interpret, or analyze nightmares as their primary treatment. While these methods may ease the ego’s anxiety they may inadvertently serve to maintain psychic splitting. Both therapist and client/patient can become involved in a form of unconscious enactment, detaching from their own terror surrounding the traumatic impact of the nightmare.
About Kenneth Kimmel
Over his thirty-five year career as a psychotherapist, Director of the Pacific Northwest Center for Dream Studies, and Jungian psychoanalyst, Kenneth has heard over 30,000 dreams. He is author of Eros and the Shattering Gaze—Transcending Narcissism (Fisher King Press, 2011) and in 2013 contributed a chapter to a Jungian anthology entitled, The Dream and Its Amplification. (Fisher King Press, 2013, Edited by Erel Shalit and Nancy Furlotti).
His early training in Gestalt practice at Esalen Institute, Jungian active-imagination, and study of cross-cultural myths, dreams, and symbols help to inform the work presented in this seminar.
FREE ALL-DAY PARKING PASSES TO THE FIRST TWENTY REGISTRANTS.
CEUs: 4 hours provided for Licensed Counselors, MFTs and Social Workers
CONTACT: Please phone or email us if you have any question:
206-447-1895 | ken@nsanpsy.com
Learning Objectives
Please be prepared to discuss a clinical case example or a personal experience of a nightmare. We will introduce experiential processes that can be applied to clinical work with dreams. Bring a journal and pen, art pad and colors.
When & Where
Night photo courtesy of Valerie C. Preisler