Robert is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Author of eight books including his recently published Victor Frankenstein, the Monster and the Shadows of Technology: The Frankenstein Prophecies, he has published essays in psychology, philosophy, literary and education journals, written a play about Frankenstein’s Monster, has done radio and TV discussions as well as online interviews, webinars, podcasts and made a DVD movie of his trip to Antarctica. In addition, he has given keynote addresses at conferences, lectured at universities and professional societies and conducted workshops in the U.S., Europe, Australia, South Africa, Canada and New Zealand.
His special area of concern is the psychology of technology especially in terms of climate crises and the impacts of digital media on our social structures. In addition, he is interested in the healing power of poetry, the art and practice of psychotherapy, the wisdom and value of dreams, the art of memoir writing, and the relations between psychology and the humanities.
Upcoming Events
My upcoming course entitled Reflections
on Ecology and Soul begins August 28
This 6 class course takes us on a journey into the depths of the soul of the world, to those places where nature, psyche, technology and humans meet. It explores how we can find a healthy engagement with soul, and shows how dreams, synchronicities and symptoms can be guides on that path. These classes tap into the wellspring of imagination and show how we can co-create a more sustainable future.
Participants can expect to deepen their understanding of:
- How unconscious dynamics shape our perceptions and reactions to climate crises.
- How dreams, symptoms, and synchronicities are psychological forms of action that can help to translate events into experiential exercises, which allow us to slow down and pause to be responsive to events that too often overwhelm us.
- How framing our current crisis in the larger contexts of myths, films and visionary literature has a healing effect.
Click here to sign up now.
On Sept 25 Robert Romanyshyn will discuss the issue of phenomenology, archetypal psychology and poetry within Jungian psychology and practice The title of his presentation, 'The Aesthetic Life of Soul: Cultivating a Poetic Sensibility in the Gap Between Phenomenology and Jungian-Archetypal Psychology,' is sponsored by Thiasos, a group of students, analysts and colleagues in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and is hosted by Marcus Quintaes.
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On October 24 Robert Romanyshyn will present a one hour online lecture as part of an online program for therapists sponsored by the Therapy Harley Street Group in London. The theme of the program is ‘Working through Covid-19 Times: From Fear to Insight .For information about the entire program contact info@therapyharleystreet.co.uk
The title of Robert’s talk is Therapists’ Grief as Healing.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS/LECTURES
Educating the Quixotic Imagination
Link to the PDF
Keynote Address: Educating the Quixotic Imagination
Sept 11-14, 2019, Alcala de Henares, Spain
European Consortium for Arts Therapies Education
Imagining Windmills: Trust, truth and the unknown in the arts therapies
I am reading Cervantes’ text as a collective cultural-historical dream that is still dreaming us. Attending to the characters of Cervantes’ dream, we are taken to the margins of his prophetic and visionary text, which, in its time having already envisioned the world that has become our own, can unsettle us with its questions about who is mad and who is sane—be they windmills or be they Giants, or is that dichotomy itself a piece of our own cultural complex?--; what is true and what is false, what is real and what is unreal, what is familiar and what is strange and estranging in its strangeness.
For a PDF file of the text see Publications and Multi Media/Articles
Diagnostic Fictions
This articled describes a key difference between the person who comes to therapy and the figure(s) who come for therapy and explores some features of a literary approach that attend to this difference and animate diagnostic descriptions with images and stories found in literature. Using Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and drawing on my re-reading of her tale, the article shows how the character of Victor Frankenstein and his story vividly personify and enrich the DSM category of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. This approach does not reduce Victor Frankenstein and his story to the diagnosis; it magnifies the diagnostic category through the lens of his image and his story.
For a PDF file of the text see Publications and Multi Media/Articles
