Dennis Merritt - M.A., PH.D., Jungian Analyst, LCSW, SC
phone: 608-255-9330 x 5
email: DLMerritt@cal.berkeley.edu

I obtained a Ph.D. from Berkeley in Insect Pathology before training at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, so my psychoanalytic practice combines the rigors of the scientific discipline with the creative imagination of the Jungians. Twenty years of experience with Lakota Sioux sweat lodge and Sundance ceremonies color how I see the soul in relation to the healing and spiritual powers in the natural world. Soulfullness is a perspective and that is what I try to help my analysands create in their lives.

My forte is dream work. I use dreams as the most powerful and direct avenue to examining the unconscious forces that determine our lives. Healing images from dreams, especially Big Dreams, offer new directions and generate a sense of a Center of Being within ourselves. I augment dreamwork with sandplay therapy, a subtle process of active imagination where the analyst and analysand makes selections from a room full of toys and places them in a sandbox in a symbolic manner. Occasionally an I Ching consultation is in order. I am also interested in how psychotherapy and dreams can help reconnect us to the land, giving us a sense that “we are all related” as the Lakota Sioux
believe.

I have been influenced by the psychodynamic approach, the genius of D. L. Winnicott, and James Gustafson’s application of dynamic systems theory to the practice of psychotherapy. In the end it is the human-to-human contact that is the most important.

Since 1983 I have been practicing at the Integral Psychology Center with individual adults across the spectrum of mental difficulties and spiritual development issues.

See my website www.DennisMerrittJungianAnalyst.com  for articles on sandplay therapy, use of the I Ching in the Psychoanalytic Setting, the practice of analysis and dreamwork, Jungian psychology and the arts, and a description of my upcoming book, The Dairy Farmer’s Guide to the Universe: Jung, Hermes, Ecopsychology and Post 9-11.

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