Strephon Kaplan-Williams

Strephon Kaplan-Williams is a leading dreamwork psychologist of the twentieth century who has a number of firsts in the field of dream and dreamwork psychology.

Education
Kaplan-Williams earned two masters degrees at the university of California Los Angeles and San Francisco in English literature and Counseling psychology. He received extensive Jungian analytical training for ten years with the Guild for Psychological Studies, graduating as one of their main leaders. He has undergone fifteen years of Jungian analysis and had many other trainings in modern California therapy approaches. He is responsible for originating the Jungian-Senoi method of dreamwork development and healing.

Professional Activity
Kaplan-Williams founded the first dreamwork institute, the Jungian-Senoi Dreamwork Institute in 1977 in Berkeley, California, U.S.A., not devoted to any one psychology but devoted to the psychology of dreamwork in practice by professionals and lay people alike. It was in existence for eleven years, during which time it offered a yearly professional training program in dreamwork and dreamwork psychology.

Strephon Kaplan-Williams is the originating founder of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD), founded in 1984 with co-founders Patricia Garfield, Gayle Delaney and Jeremy Taylor, and today the major organization in the field of dreams and their many approaches to understanding them. He is the only original co-founder who has not been elected president by the board and membership, despite his important contributions to the field of dreamwork psychology and the American dreamwork movement. Stephen LaBerge was later made a co-founder but was not a member of the team of the original four co-founders, nor ever took an active part in the organization itself.

Strephon Kaplan-Williams started the first dreamwork training program for professionals (1979) at his newly formed Jungian-Senoi Dreamwork Institute in Berkeley, California involving weekly year-long study in the basic techniques for doing dreamwork with individuals and groups not associated with any one school of psychology.

He has given one, two and three year professional training programs to psychologists and lay people in dreamwork psychology since 1980. He has taught his approach in eleven countries. These include: United States, Canada, England, Scotland, Wales, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Germany and Romania.

Originator
Strephon Kaplan-Williams is the first to originate the terms, dreamwork psychology and dream psychology to differentiate dreams and dreamwork as a separate branch of psychology.

Until 2002, when Strephon Kaplan-Williams and a few psychologists made the initial declaration, dreams and dreamwork had always been considered a part of a school of psychology. Now he saw that dreams and dreamwork should be differentiated as a separate branch of psychology itself. Such a branch of psychology needs a developed psychology curriculum, institutes to teacher dreamwork psychology as well as do further research and development.

Kaplan-Williams is responsible for redefining the terms, dreamwork (Freud invented the term but did not combine the words, a conscious decision), dream ego, or drego, and waking ego, objectifying dreams, dream source, dream reentry, dreamwork psychology, and the ego and the seven basic archetypes model. He is the first to compile together a set of complete dreamwork techniques, many credited to their originators, some he originated himself. He is personally responsible for originating the dreamwork methods: Objectifying Dreams, Following the Dream Ego, the Dream Task, Seven Basic Archetypes Dreamwork and modifying these other techniques substantially: Dream Dialogue, Dream Enactments, Dream Reentry(of which he originated the term) and Shamanic Dreamwork. These techniques were originally published in his Jungian-Senoi Dreamwork Manual (1978, 1980) and further expanded in his Dreamworking: A Comprehensive Guide For Working With Dreams (1991).

Works
As a contribution to this newly emerging field, Strephon Kaplan-Williams wrote and published three dreamwork manuals: the Jungian-Senoi Dreamwork Manual (1978, 1980), Dreamworking (1991), and Elements of Dreamwork (1991).

Kaplan-Williams published the first Dream Cards (1991, Simon and Schuster, sold over 110,000 copies in eight languages). They are still being re-published in the Netherlands (Droomkaarten), Brazil and Germany (Traum Symbol Karten) fifteen years later, but are not yet available again in English. He also published in 2004 the private editions The Dream Alphabet and The Dream Cards Recipes. His other published books include The Practice of Personal Transformation, Transforming Childhood.

Current developments
Current developments for Strephon Kaplan-Williams at his present age of seventy-two (2006-2007) are focused on Internet publishing and outreach.


 * He is a popular podcaster in spiritual and psychological subjects with a current rate of over 1,000 new listeners a week for a total in January, 2007 of almost 50,000 total listeners.


 * He specializes also in the new field of Information Processing, having originated the first computer software, interactive interface.

He has just published in 2006 the first fully comprehensive, 92,000 word, software interface called The Writer’s Interface for use with the WriteItNow software for writers on both the Macintosh and PC’s.

Strephon Kaplan-Williams will demonstrate his own testing of his new The Writer’s Interface by using it in the coming year to write at least one novel. He has already started with a ‘Jesus novel.’

Developments of The Writer’s Interface, now being sold to the public, is recorded on The Writer’s Interface Blog, run by Strephon Kaplan-Williams and associate, Stefania Frumentia Marian.