Jungian Analysis and Psychotherapy
"The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not?"
C.G. Jung
Phone: (510) 531-2534 email: sbherrmann@comcast
Steven Herrmann, PhD, MFT, Jungian Analyst
Welcome to my Website
I am a Jungian analyst and an analyst member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, where I teach in the Institute’s analytic training program. I have my PhD in clinical psychology and am a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT). I've taught and presented nationally and internationally, published several book chapters, numerous articles, and ten books.
Jungian analysis is a method of treatment that helps you see that neurosis is a defense against the creative urge or will to create. Creativity requires courage and resilience to bring it into the world. Therefore, helping you become more creative and motivated in life is a primary goal of analytic treatment.
As a Jungian analyst, I look at problems from an in-depth point of view by focusing on the inner voice, the calling, or vocation. Helping you find out what your dreams mean across the course of an analysis is key to my work. Oftentimes, the discovery of your individual dream language requires a careful keeping of a dream journal, which can help to identify and alleviate suffering and vitalize relationships over time, with some regular discipline and inner work.
The aim of life is to transform the creative instinct into a personal myth or theory of truth that is uniquely your own. Often this involves sacrifice and emotional suffering, whether in the heroic phase of life, or during your middle years when life faces you with limitations and blows of fate, leading ultimately to a death of your old patterns of behavior, and a rebirth into a new identity and accelerated individuation.
Transformation during midlife involves a change from a career-orientation to a vocational-orientation, where the aim is no longer placed upon your ego and its limited needs, but upon ever-increasing Self-knowledge, which springs from your deepest sense of significance and well-being. The way to awaken the Self though Jungian analysis is through relatedness, career visioning, dream analysis, family of origin work, and active imagination. When you live a symbolic existence, the meaninglessness of life may be changed into meaningful work, and neurotic symptoms and suffering may be significantly reduced. You may begin to experience in the analytic process true Joy in your life, like you perhaps never knew was possible before because you lacked the empathy that analysis can provide through a trusting and caring relationship, where old patterns can be discarded and outgrown.
Vocational dreams have been central to my research for the past 45 years. I've taught Vocational Dreams in the analytic training program at the CG Jung Institute of SF. I believe calling dreams are the most significant variables for individuation, transformation, and the realization of the Self to flourish in analytic treatment. I work with patients who may be struggling with depression or anxiety due to the fact that they have not been living in accordance with the summons of their inner voice to pursue a path towards wholeness.
My writings and teaching include subjects such as Jungian literary criticism, American poetry, shamanism, sandplay, active imagination, Spiritual Democracy, yoga, and psychology and religion. My recent book publications include "Spiritual Democracy: The Wisdom of Early American Visionaries for the Journey Forward" (2014), “William James and C. G. Jung: Doorways to the Self" (2020), "Vocational Dreams: Calling Archetypes and Nuclear Symbols" (2024), "Meister Eckhart and C.G. Jung: On the Vocation of the Self" (2024), and "Murray Stein: Individuation, Transformation, and the Ways to the Self in Jungian Psychology" (2025).