A Dream in the World

A Dream in the World explores the possibility of genuine religious experience during the process of depth psychotherapy. At the heart of this book is a series of archetypal dreams presented by the author's patient during an analytic process. These dreams heralded an unanticipated breakthrough encounter with the divine - an "experience of soul" - that reoriented and energized life and became what the author calls a "dream-in-the-world." To explore the phenomenology of this religious experience, the author compares her patient's religious encounter with mystical experience in general and with the visions and poetry of Hadewijch of Brabant, a thirteenth-century woman mystic, whose ecstatic experience of the divine closely parallels the patient's material. A Dream in the World details a classical Jungian psychotherapeutic process through analysis of a modern woman's dreams. It searches out relationships between religious encounter and psychotherapy, and psyche and soul, and it demonstrates the gradual unfolding and maturation of what C. G. Jung called a "religious instinct" in the human psyche. Robin van L/ben Sels serves on the faculty of the Center for Depth Pscychology and Jungian Studies in Katonah, New York. She is currently in private practice in Manhatten and Katonah (New York) and Ridgefield (Connecticut).