Biography

Michael Vannoy Adams lives in New York City, where he is a Jungian analyst in the private practice of psychotherapy. He also delivers presentations, conducts workshops, and teaches courses on Jungian psychology and provides private supervision for psychotherapists with an interest in Jungian analysis.

Adams has written three books, The Fantasy Principle: Psychoanalysis of the Imagination (Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2004), The Mythological Unconscious (New York and London: Karnac, 2001), and The Multicultural Imagination: "Race," Color, and the Unconscious (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), as well as over 30 articles on such topics as dreams, myths, archetypal psychology, metaphor, the imagination, the cultural unconscious, semiotics, deconstruction, racism, and anti-Semitism.

He has received three Gradiva Awards from the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis: in 2005 for The Fantasy Principle: Psychoanalysis of the Imagination, in 2000 for "Womanning: Catastrophe, Creation, and the Mythopoeic Forces of Mankind" - a Jungian study of the schizophrenic Daniel Paul Schreber, who fantasized that he was being transformed into a woman in order to have transsexual intercourse with God and be impregnated and delivered of a new world - and in 1999 for "Refathering Psychoanalysis, Deliteralizing Hillman: Imaginal Therapy, Individual and Cultural."

Adams is a faculty member at the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association (JPA), a new program to train Jungian analysts in the New York City area. He is a clinical associate professor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, where he is a member of the Independent Group. He is an associate professor at the New York University School of Social Work, where he teaches the course "Critical Thinking, Spirituality, and Psychotherapy." He is a faculty member at the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, where he teaches the course "Dream Analysis: Object Relations and Jungian Perspectives." He has also taught at the Blanton-Peale Institute, the Institute for Expressive Analysis, and Pacifica Graduate Institute. He is a faculty member at Eugene Lang College: The New School for Liberal Arts, where he teaches the courses "Dream Interpretation," "Psychoanalyzing Greek and Roman Mythology," and "Psychoanalyzing Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Mythology." He was previously associate provost of The New School. He has also taught at the University of Sussex in England, Brandeis University, Lafayette College, Villanova University, and Utkal University in India, where he was a Fulbright senior lecturer.

Adams is a member of the editorial advisory boards of Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture and Harvest: Journal of Jungian Studies. He has been a member of the boards of directors of the Object Relations Institute, the International Federation for Psychoanalytic Education, and the Association for the Study of Dreams. He has been an external examiner at Goldsmiths College of the University of London and an honorary research fellow at the University of Kent.

He received a B.A. in History and Journalism from Texas Christian University, an M.A. in American Civilization from the University of Texas at Austin, a D.Phil. in American Studies from the University of Sussex in England, where he was a Marshall scholar, an M.S.W. from New York University, and a certificate in psychoanalysis from the C.G. Jung Institute of New York.

For additional biographical information, read Michael Vannoy Adams's "For Love of the Imagination".