Montague
Ullman, MD died from a stroke on June 7, 2008 with loved ones by his side. He was emeritus professor at Einstein College
and a highly collaborative pioneer in dream work who authored over eighty
professional papers and several books, including Behavioral
Changes in Patients Following Strokes (1962). He
co-authored Working with Dreams (1979) and Dream Telepathy (1973, 2nd Ed. 2003), and
co-edited The Variety of Dream Experience (1987, 2nd Ed. 1999) and Handbook of States of
Consciousness (1986). His books have been translated into a variety
of languages, with his last volume, Appreciating Dreams—A Group Approach
(1996), translated into Chinese in 2007.
A recent release is Ingrid Blidberg’s Swedish film, Catch the Dream,
featuring Ullman and his dream process.
A fellow
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. Ullman was a
charter fellow of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, a life fellow of the
American Psychiatric Association, and past president of the Society of Medical
Psychoanalysts and the American Society for Psychical Research. He also served as president of the
Parapsychological Association and the Gardner Murphy Research Institute. In 2006, Montague Ullman was the recipient of
an honorary Lifetime Achievement Award (and membership) by the International
Association for the Study of Dreams, in recognition of his leadership in the
dream community. He was cited, among
other accomplishments, for his role as “father of the group dream work movement
that has taken hold all around the world” and through his serious scientific
approach, increased the credibility of the study of precognitive and telepathic
dreams.
In the
field of psychohistory, Ullman supported the Psychohistory Forum from its
inception in 1983—his name graces our letterhead. Besides occasionally writing on dreams for
this journal, in a series of workshops and individual consultation, he helped
to develop the Historical Dreamwork Method, always insisting upon rigorous
methodological standards.
As a
result of being invited to write an extensive autobiographical essay, in his
early seventies Monte (everyone called him Monte) provided a most insightful
description of his family background, education, emotions, accomplishments and
life in general, which we quote liberally below (See Arthur S. Berger,
“Autobiographical Notes – Montague Ullman,” Lives and Letters in American
Parapsychology: A Biographical History, 1850-1987, 1988). It has enabled us to write more about his
adolescence and motivation than is usually the case in memorial.
Montague
Ullman was born in New York City on September 9, 1916 as the elder of two sons
and first of three children to the daughter of Polish immigrants and an
immigrant from Hungary who had come to America as a teenager. His father William was “generous to a fault,”
“a superb salesman” who “smoked heavily, drank, overate” and gambled. He built the family business manufacturing
men’s hats and overcoats, prior to his early death from a stroke on his
forty-fourth birthday. The family moved
from the Lower East Side to the Bronx to middle class respectability on the
Upper West Side of Manhattan. Monte’s
conventional mother, Nettie Eisler Ullman, “was a superb cook and baker but
given to hysterical anxiety at the slightest provocation.” She loved “babies and small children but
didn’t do so well when the child’s struggles to individuate itself began.” She never fully recovered from the sudden
death of her husband.
The
Ullman’s household was not intellectual, but the parents did aspire for their
children to get a good education and advance themselves. Monte reported, “as far as I could remember,
I never saw my mother or father ever read a book.” However, his “father’s best friend” often
came for Sabbath (Friday night) dinner and “did read and became the first
inspirational figure” of Monte’s life.
He was the family doctor who was “a very comforting presence when we
were ill…[who] would overcome our apprehension with
the songs he made up as he examined us and the way he made us laugh.” This association of laughter with healing is
perhaps an ingredient in Monte’s subsequent career as a healer, who had a
twinkle in his eye, as he used dreams as a curative instrument. He was drawn to
medicine by “family pressures as well as my own aspirations.” He came to feel “at odds” with his parents,
growing up “rejecting their world of bourgeois, religious, commercial values.” His distance from his parents, including
their staunch Republicanism, was painful but “also made it possible for me to
follow my own path.” His own path would
lead him to being drawn to communism and, far more importantly, paranormal
research.
After
attending a three-year high school in New York, just before his fifteenth
birthday, he enrolled in City College of New York. He reports being “bright enough to handle the
work but inside I felt like the immature child I was. I wanted very much to get into medical school
and to get the grades necessary for admission” but the competition was
“severe.” To his deep mortification, his
father, who “so wanted me to become a doctor that, despite some resistance and
shame on my part, he was not above using influence to ease my admission into
medical school at New York University at the end of my third year at
college.” Though he
found “the first two years at medical school” to be “difficult” there was “a
deep satisfaction that came from the fascination of the subject matter and the
prestige of being a medical student.”
In college,
extracurricular exposure to psychic phenomena oriented him to the mysteries of
the unconscious realm of existence, including dream life. Just turned sixteen, he knew nothing about
psychical research and was studying hard to prepare for medical school, when a
science classmate friend confided in him about his personal encounter with
psychic phenomena in a series of Saturday night séances. This experience evolved into a very serious
project and inspired Monte to be a psychic researcher. Sixty years later, he brought together five
of the group that had participated in the séances and published an account of
it in 2001 in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research.
In January
1939, Monte began four years of hospital training: two as an intern, one as a
neurology resident, and one as a psychiatric resident at the New York State
Psychiatric Institute. His background in
neurology oriented him to the neurophysiology of dreaming; his practice in
psychoanalysis oriented him to the metaphorical structure and healing potential
of the dream, and later work in community psychiatry impressed upon him the
importance of identifying and sharing the skills necessary to make dreams
generally accessible.
In 1942,
preparing for his psychoanalytic career, he went into personal analysis, which
was interrupted when he was drafted into the Army where he served as a
captain. Upon his discharge in December
1945, he opened an office for the practice of neurology and psychiatry, moving
into psychoanalysis in 1946 as he completed training, and began teaching, at
the New York Medical College. The 1950s
solidified his three major interests: exciting new approaches to
psychoanalytic thinking and practice, a growing interest in dreams, and
bringing the paranormal into the mainstream of his life. Ullman terminated his private practice and
left the New York Medical College in 1961 to develop a department of psychiatry
at Maimonides Hospital (later Maimonides Medical Center) in Brooklyn.
In 1962 Monte Ullman established the Dream
Laboratory at Maimonides with a grant obtained by Gardner Murphy that enabled
the exploration of dreams and telepathy.
In 1967 he also developed, and later operated, a community mental health
center noteworthy for launching many innovative community programs to provide
preventive psychiatry. Monte’s lifelong
commitment to helping ordinary people, which had led him to left wing causes
and to visit the Soviet health care system in 1938, informed his decisions to
establish a community mental health program focused on prevention, and to
develop a method of bringing the healing power of dreamwork to ordinary people.
The work
of Monte and his collaborators constituted the primary source of experimental
evidence that the content of dreams may be related to telepathy. One of the great parapsychological advances
of the late twentieth century came through his use of physiological methodology
for monitoring dreams. Using the EEG to
record brain waves and the Rapid-Eye-Movement technique to record eye movements
permitted him to discern when sleeping subjects were dreaming and for how long,
prior to waking them for their dream reports.
In 1974,
Monte awakened to the work of the late physicist David Bohm and developed the
concept of a connection between the mystery of dreaming consciousness and
Bohm’s approach to still unsettled issues in quantum theory. He resigned from Maimonides to pursue his
interest in dreams elsewhere. In Sweden
from 1974 to 1976, he developed a group dream work process, resulting in the
formation of a national society in 1990.
The Dream Group Forum, followed in 2003 with the Dream Group Forum in
Finland. Both groups were committed to
extending dream work into the community, an undertaking based on that
experiential group method Monte initiated.
It proved suitable not only as a training instrument for professional
therapists, but also for making dream work accessible to the interested layman.
Returning
to the United States, Ullman joined the Albert Einstein College of Medicine as
clinical professor of psychiatry, and the Westchester Center for the Study of
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy to teach therapists in training about his
group method. He became more and more convinced that serious and effective
dream work could extend beyond the consulting room into the community. Monte became known for devotion in teaching
his approach to both therapists and laity internationally.
Toward the
end of his life, Monte reflected upon telepathy as a mental field derived from
the universal unconscious. Thus, he had
meshed his work in telepathic dreaming with the connectedness of the dream
group process and Bohm’s theory of connectivity. He was a director of the Lifwynn Foundation
believing that fragmentation of our unity as a species has evolved because we
fail to recognize our interconnectedness.
Ullman elaborated, “Our dreams are concerned with the nature of our
connections with others. The history of the human race, while awake, is a
history of fragmentation, of separating people and communities of people ...
nationally, religiously, politically” but while asleep “our dreams are
connected with the basic truth that we are all members of a single species.”
Monte was
a happy, charming, gentle soul who never forgot to be human. His enormous compassion and infectious humor
effected people in every walk of life.
Many described him as a profoundly modest man and a humanitarian who
made a significant human and scientific contribution to the world. His impact on psychiatry, psychology and
parapsychology is a substantial legacy reflecting his wisdom, his insight and
his critical acumen.
His
extraordinary abilities as a listener were key to
Monte Ullman’s specialness as a human being.
He listened to the conscious and unconscious with rapt attention and
taught others to do the same in a playful manner. The safety and playfulness of his dreamers,
built into the experiential dream method, was central to its success. Adults must trust and feel secure to reveal
their unconscious before others; his method guaranteed that the dreamer was in
charge and could stop the process at any time.
It also enticed dream group members to literally “make the dream their
own”—“playing with it”—as they projected onto it and teased out its
nuances. This offered new possibilities
to the dreamer, to be accepted or rejected.
The dream dialogue also left the dreamer totally in control of the
process.
Members
of dream groups knew Montague Ullman was something special. After all, here was a psychiatrist and
psychoanalyst welcoming people into his home, using his first name, and working
in the dream vineyards (in my personal experience illegal, illiterate grape
pickers probably make more money for their labor than do most dream
workers!). He did not seek to squeeze
the reality of those he sought to help into some theoretic Procrustean bed, as
was not uncommon in his profession. As a
“recovered psychiatrist,” rather than making a handsome income prescribing
legal drugs to patients, he put aside the authority and prestige of psychiatry
to help people come into close contact with their unconscious desires because
of his belief in the healing power of dreams—when listened to rather than
suppressed and repressed. He did not
need the big income, office, and title to heal people. In fact, he thought these were obstacles to
helping people know themselves, since they expected knowledge to come
exclusively from “the doctor” rather than themselves. Monte believed the Socratic dictum “know thyself” was the key to healing.
Psychoanalytic
training and experience were invaluable assets in Ullman’s work with dreams and
dreamers. They helped him see past the
defensiveness, reaction formations, rigidity, and verbiage so often used as
defenses against relating to others positively and knowing oneself. When a new member appeared in the dream group
behaving like a bull in a china shop, he listened to his own dream in which the
disruptive man appeared as a teddy bear, and Monte knew the individual could
ultimately adjust to the group, which he did.
In dealing with an energetic, loquacious, talented, dream enthusiast who
for years did not accept the need for boundaries, he was insistent to the point
of toughness, about enforcing the rules allowing space for the dreamer and the
other participants to understand the dream’s meanings.
Monte
was quite willing to reveal himself when he thought it might help someone
struggling with a problem. In my case,
both my brother and mother had died quite young at the same age, and when that
age loomed before me, my death anxiety was revealed in a dream. Monte spoke of
having confronted the same issue as he approached age forty-four when his
father had died of a stroke. His sharing
of his own anxieties was most reassuring.
My own
route to discovering the enormous value of Ullman’s work was circuitous. My course on dreams in psychoanalytic
training had been disappointing. The
instructor and materials were uninspiring.
In therapy sessions and control (supervision) analysis I discovered the
enormous value of dreams for probing the patient’s unconscious, but felt
frustrated since the patient did not see what I saw in the dream, yet looked to
me to articulate what it said. I
appreciated the insight regarding my own countertransference when I dreamed of
being President Carter’s psychoanalyst at a time I was writing a
psychobiography of him, yet I needed additional tools for probing dreams. I wanted to be able to probe the treasure
trove of dreams of the pioneer chemist Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) which I had
discovered on a 1981 sabbatical in England and most of all, I wanted to uncover
the creativity revealed in our dreams.
In
1982, after Monte spoke on dreams at my New Jersey psychoanalytic institute, I
found a new way to understanding dreams.
The outcome was that after I attended his dream group sessions in
Ardsley, New York, as well as one or two leadership training sessions, I became
an Ullman dream group leader. I worked
with Monte, Don Hughes, Mena Potts, and others to apply a modified version of
the Ullman technique to the dreams of historical personages (The Historical
Dreamwork Method), and I wrote articles and chapters of books on
dreamwork. We may not have been able to
get deceased dreamers to associate to their dreams, but we could greatly
enlarge the number of possible explanations for it and help the historical
biographer to understand much more about his/her own countertransference to the
subject. Without having in-depth
knowledge of psychohistory, Monte supported the Psychohistory Forum and
occasionally wrote for Clio’s
Psyche.
As a
historian and psychoanalyst, I was taught to be skeptical of claims of
precognition and telepathy, generally finding other disclaimed explanations for
these assertions. Yet, because of a
precognitive dream, I can happily report that a gift copy of Ullman and
Krippner sits on my shelf with a dedication reading, “To Paul[,]
who precognized a situation and solved it[.]
Appreciatively[,] Monte[,]
July 1984.” On July 9, 1984 I
dreamt that I had a flat tire and presented the dream in Ullman’s group which
was meeting for the first time on the following Monday. Uncharacteristically, he left the group
briefly to answer and make phone calls and appeared to be a bit
distracted. Amidst his apologies to the
dreamer and group for the interruptions, he explained that a potential buyer,
with whom he had no way of communicating, was coming to look at his used Volvo
shortly after our meeting and that the mechanic had promised to come directly
to fix a flat tire that had been discovered only that morning. After the meeting was over, I volunteered to
replace the flat with his spare tire, which I did. The following week as I walked out of the
next dream group meeting, Monte handed me his book with the dedication.
A key reason for Monte Ullman’s success was his genuine interest in and
respect for people. He sat back in his
chair in a relaxed manner, radiating curiosity, good will, kindness, infectious
humor, intelligence, interest, and warmth.
He kept the focus on the dream, gently rejected theory as a distraction,
and helped dreamers focus on their own day and life residue, associations,
feelings, and fantasies regarding concrete images in their nocturnal
productions. As he spoke slowly and
deliberately, we sat at the edge of our seats listening to his every word. Dr. Ullman’s very expertise would have been a
distraction form the ultimate source of knowledge of the dream—the dreamer. The ultimate genius of his methodology was
that most of the time he took the back seat, serving only as the protector of
the dream method, while the dreamer was allowed free rein of interpretation,
and the group projected onto the dream (“played with it”) and dialogued about
the possible meanings of the dream.
Our best ways to commemorate Montague Ullman are to probe our own dreams,
lead dream groups using his methodology, examine claims of precognitive and
telepathic dreams as well as of paranormal experiences with his scientific
precision, and value the creativity and the healing powers of dreams. Should I find the time to complete my book, The Creativity of Dreams, the
dedication will include Monte’s name alongside that of my wife.
With the
June 7th death of Dr. Montague Ullman, a renowned psychoanalyst and
psychiatrist, we have suffered the loss of a towering figure and leading
authority in the psychology of dreams and dreaming. Monte’s death was a deep personal and
professional loss for me. Its impact was
cushioned by a dream I had a month before his passing; he was in a hospital bed
with tubes and an oxygen mask—I felt he was dying. That dream marked his departure, while a
dream in the late 1970s presaged our meeting later in the 1980s.
Monte’s
peerless achievements in the field are punctuated with firsts: he was the first full-time director of the Department of
Psychiatry at Maimonides Hospital, he was the first to develop a community
mental health center in New York, he was the first to develop a sleep
laboratory at Maimonides in Brooklyn, New York, he was the first to conduct
ground-breaking, scientifically-controlled laboratory experiments in dream
telepathy—along with Dr. Stanley Krippner—and he was the first to originate the
Experiential Dream Group Process in order to move dream work out of the
consulting room and into the community.
Monte’s grassroots, dream-work movement has spread to Sweden, Finland,
Taiwan, and elsewhere. He is first in
the understanding of dreams.
I came to
know Monte by a rather labyrinthine path.
In the mid 1970s I went to Zurich and studied dreams with Jungian
analyst, Frau Dora Kalf, a member of Jung’s original group. I took courses at the Jung Institute and at
Frau Kalf’s East-West Psychology Institute, during which I had a rare, all-day
small group session with the revered Dalai Lama; both he and Kalf were
spiritually inspiring and professionally motivating. When I returned I sought a doctoral program
in the psychology of dreams, but could not locate one.
Later that
decade I had a precognitive dream in which I had dreamed that a “Dr. Monet” or
“Dr. Monte” could help me locate such a doctoral program. That dream led me to seek out Dr. Ullman’s
assistance whose full name and nickname I did not know at the time. Dr. Ullman told me “no graduate degree
program in dreams and dreaming exists,” but he offered to help develop a
doctoral program through the Union Institute and he served on my doctoral
committee with Drs. Stanley Krippner, Clark Moustakas, and others.
Dr. Ullman
structured my experiential dream group internship, my internship at the
Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and my psychic dream internship at
the American Society For Psychical Research. Were it not for Monte, I could never have
received the first doctorate ever awarded in the psychology of dreams. I am deeply indebted to him for all he gave
to me and will cherish his memory.
Through Monte I found what I could not locate within the walls of a
university: the largest collection of dream knowledge and a wonderful
methodology. I had found “Dr. Monet -Monte” and my personal cathedral of
learning.
Monte was
internationally renowned and singularly beloved, but fame and adulation could
not turn his head or inflate his ego.
Monte possessed gentility, decency, and humility, exhibiting love and
caring in his relationships with his family and others. That’s how I will remember him. I was honored to have worked with Monte
professionally, and privileged to have shared an endearing friendship with him
for nearly three decades, as was my husband Dom. We miss Monte profoundly, will recall him
fondly, remember his iconic contributions to dream work, and tribute his
exceptional character and humanity as a stellar human being.
<><><>CP<><><>
A Man for All Seasons Who Changed
My Life
Stanley Krippner - Saybrook Graduate School and
Research Center
In 1961, Montague Ullman
founded a dream laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. A few years later, he asked several eminent
psychologists and psychiatrists to direct the laboratory’s research program on
anomalous effects in dreams. They all
turned him down because the laboratory was only assured funding for three
years, and the study of telepathic, clairvoyant, and precognitive dreams was
hardly a move that would lead to career advancement. When Monte offered the position to me, I
immediately accepted it and have never regretted the decision.
When I arrived in Brooklyn,
Monte told me about the adventures he shared with a few college
friends, a series of private meetings marked by ostensibly anomalous events
such as the sudden appearance of strange objects and messages purportedly
written by a “Dr. Bindelof,” a physician who claimed to have died in 1919. He also told me of psychotherapeutic
encounters in which patients reported dreams that incorporated specific
elements of his own personal life. These
were the personal sources that motivated Monte to organize a dream laboratory
that took advantage of newly developed technology—monitoring research
participants’ brain waves and eye movement activity—to determine the
appropriate time to awaken them and ask for dream reports.
Monte and I designed an
experimental protocol that involved introducing a staff member to a volunteer,
and then separating them for the night.
Once the staff member reached his or her own room, the staff member
opened a randomly selected envelope and focused on the enclosed art print. Research participants tried to incorporate
these images into their dreams; a team of outside experts attempted to match
dream protocols with the art prints used on those nights—and did so at
statistically significant levels. It was
a pleasure to work out the details of these studies with Monte; his insights
into both the dreaming process and the nature of anomalous phenomena provided
material that I could draw upon in designing an airtight procedure that would
be evaluated statistically and that would rule out trickery, sensory cueing,
and coincidence.
Indeed, we were a “dream team,”
that enjoyed a “dream relationship.” Our
contact continued after we both left Maimonides in the early 1970s. I studied Monte’s dream appreciation method
at his home in Ardsley, New York, which also gave me the opportunity to
maintain contact with his lovely wife, Janet.
Our visits were marked by intellectual discussions, philosophical
speculations, and personal interchanges.
We discussed life’s triumphs and tragedies frankly and openly, including
his grief over Janet’s death and, later, her appearance in a series of
remarkable dreams.
When I turned seventy-five,
Monte and his companion Judy Gardiner drove to Manhattan to help me
celebrate. I introduced him to my family
and friends as “the man who changed my life.”
The same can be said of other men and women I have known, but my
friendship with Monte was multi-dimensional.
It was marked by intellectual growth (on my part), wit (primarily on his part), and
storytelling (on both our parts). Monte
Ullman was more than a man for all seasons; he was a man for all reasons.
<><><>CP<><><>
Over forty years ago, I first met Montague
Ullman in Miami when he sought to recruit me for a position at Maimonides
Hospital to establish a Sleep and Dream Laboratory to study telepathic
dreams. At the time I was working with
Calvin Hall at the Institute of Dream Research. For several hours
each day sitting under a palm tree, Calvin and I were busy scoring up dreams
and working on our book The Content Analysis of Dreams. Though I
found Monte to be a quite charming, kind, warm person with a wonderful
smile and sense of humor, that idyllic setting overruled any considerations
about moving to Brooklyn. His subsequent
hire of Dr. Stanley Krippner turned out to be the perfect choice to meet the
needs for that challenging Maimonides project.
Eventually, Calvin and I investigated
whether telepathic material could be incorporated into dream content and
got very encouraging results. Monte
invited me to see whether I would be able to demonstrate similarly successful
results at Maimonides partly because of my excellent memory for the details of
dreams and capabilities as a telepathic receiver. I eventually
participated as a subject on eight experimental nights during a forty-four week period. On each morning that I had served as a
subject, I would spend an hour or two with Monte while we explored at great
length my feelings about the person several hundred yards away in a locked room
who had served as the “sender,” what was going on in my life at the time, what
associations I had to the target picture and so forth. Monte was the “sender” on one of these
experimental nights. It was an interesting
process to weave back and forth all the associations to the material that
emerged that night. The publication of Monte and Stan’s classic book
Dream Telepathy eventuated from nearly a decade of their systematic
research on this topic.
It was a pleasure to be in the audience
when Monte received his award for Lifetime Achievement in Dreamwork from
the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) at their annual
meeting in 2006. No one was a more
deserving recipient than Monte. His theoretical
proposals involving the vigilance hypothesis, the role of inter-species
connectedness, and his recent forays into finding links between the mysterious
realms of the paranormal and David Bohm’s theories on quantum physics have
always been beautifully articulated, well reasoned, and extremely compelling.
During our recent 2008 IASD conference in
Montreal, Dr. Milton Kramer emphasized in his invited address how
groundbreaking Monte’s humanitarian role had been in establishing the first
mental-health clinic in New York City and how he had always been a strong
advocate for the under-served and under privileged.
Monte was an incredibly
humble man who would easily become embarrassed if anyone attempted to
congratulate him for being the outstanding human being and friend that he was
to so many of us, or if we tried to point out how extraordinarily significant
his theoretical contributions had been in shaping our views about the purpose
and functions of dreaming. Monte also
completely revolutionized the way that dreams were dealt with in professional
settings. His compassionate and
supportive way of working with dream groups and spelling out the techniques
that eventually became incorporated into his compassionate “if it were my
dream” technique have been enthusiastically spread around the globe.
Montague
Ullman was one of the great mentors in my life.
His groundbreaking research with Stanley Krippner into psychic
phenomenon and telepathy in dreams validated what I had experienced since I was
a young child—and confirmed that I was sane.
After
reading Dream Telepathy, I knew this was someone I had to study
with. I can not remember where we first
met—I think it was a workshop at the Open Center in New York in the early
1980s. I do recall that I was the only
lay dream worker there, surrounded by psychoanalysts and psychotherapists and
others much more credentialed than I was.
Monte put me completely at ease, letting me know he was delighted to
have a nonprofessional in the group.
That was
the beginning of a long and wonderful friendship. I attended every possible Leadership Training
Workshop, feeling comfortable as we sat in a circle of chairs in Monte’s
book-lined living room discussing the fine points of leading a dream
group. It was naturally a prerequisite
that the man I married had to attend one of these seminars—and we have been
sharing dreams ever since. (I think it
makes for a healthy relationship.) When
we married, Monte gave us a piece of art his daughter had created—it’s in our
bedroom and I call it “the city dreaming.”
Monte
often said, “Whisper dreams in my ear and I’ll follow you anywhere.” Well, he and Ingegerd Hansson, who was
involved with the Swedish Dream Group Forum, whispered dreams in my ear and I
followed them to Greece in 1995 shortly after I went into remission from a late
stage cancer. I am convinced that it was
more healing than the chemotherapy, and I have been doing dream work with
cancer patients ever since. It was on
the plane returning from Greece that I presented the idea of a newsletter about
his work. At first Monte said it
wouldn’t work, but before we landed he said “maybe.” The result was Dream Appreciation, a
quarterly newsletter we published from 1996-2002. This was wonderful because it allowed him to
share new thoughts and insights in a more informal way than refereed
journals. There he introduced the
concept that dream group members are “midwives to the dream” and wrote a series
on “dreams and art” which was inspired by The Actors Studio.
In 2006 I
was honored to present Monte with the International Association for the Study
of Dreams (IASD) Lifetime Achievement Award for his research and
contributions to the field of dreams.
Always a modest man, he was surprised at the IASD award and the
overwhelming audience response to his talk.
He did not realize how many lives he had touched—including mine—or how
many people came to understand their dreams through his gentle process.
We have
lost a great luminary, but his light is shining in other dimensions—and perhaps
even in our dreams.
David Lotto - Psychohistory Forum Researcher
In 1979 in my second year of
psychoanalytic training at the Westchester Center for the Study of
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, I was introduced to working with dreams
in a class led by Monte Ullman. There
were about a dozen of us in the twelve-week-long class. Each class consisted of one of us presenting
a recent dream which we then spent the next hour and a half working with using
Monte’s experiential model of group dreamwork.
He was a true master at getting people to feel comfortable and competent
in presenting their own dreams and working with the dreams of others.
In addition to getting to know my
classmates and becoming known to them in a new and much more intimate way,
which considerably enhanced my learning over the following years, Monte showed
us the richness and complexity of dreams.
He taught us that essential skill of being able to open yourself to what
the dream images say, the additional things the dreamer may tell us, and our
own associations, feelings, and reactions.
Of the thirty-six courses I took at the
institute, Monte’s was the one which I remember the most. By the end of the course I felt that I had
been fully launched on the process of becoming a psychoanalyst—having been
initiated into the quintessential art of psychoanalysis—working with dreams.
A number of years later I was involved in
organizing a conference on dreams in the Berkshires in which he was the keynote
speaker and led the large group of participants in an Ullman dream group
experience. He did a wonderful job and
was highly appreciated by the participants.
Monte left the world a richer place.
He will be missed.
My acquaintance with Monte developed
through our participation in the activities of the Lifwynn Foundation, beginning
in the 1990s. The Foundation was
predicated on the assumption that beneath interpersonal conflict lays an innate
disposition to social harmony. Monte
enthusiastically subscribed to this perspective writing that “in each of us,
there is an incorruptible core of being that is sensitive to the way we hurt
ourselves or others, and concerned with undoing the fragmentation that has
resulted.” Furthermore, “our dreams are
constant reminders of the infinity of ways we have managed to get derailed and,
at the same time, they provide us with the opportunity to get back on track.”
With sheer social genius Monte
created a group dream work process that carries group members in the direction
of awareness of their solidarity and connectedness. He created a safe atmosphere with a
non-intrusive process that leads to the lowering of social defenses and
promotes a deep level of sharing and communion.
Monte radiated wisdom,
calmness, and centeredness in his being that encouraged group members to
explore deeply within themselves and discover their capacity for similar
feelings. It was an honor and a
privilege to be his friend and colleague, participate in his dream groups, and
benefit from his benign presence. q
*
Contributors to the September 2008 Edition on the 2008 American Election
and the Ullman Memorial
James
William Anderson, PhD, a psychologist and psychoanalyst, is Clinical Professor,
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Northwestern University, and
a faculty member at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. Editor of the Annual of Psychoanalysis,
he has published psychobiographical essays on Frank Lloyd Wright, William and
Henry James, Woodrow Wilson, and Edith Wharton, as well as a series of papers
on the methodology of psychobiography.
Professor Anderson may be contacted at j-anderson3@northwestern.edu.
Sho Araiba was born in 1983 and
grew up in Tokyo before becoming an international student in America. After attending SUNY Rockland Community
College from 2003 to 2005 he continued his study in psychology at CUNY Queens
College from 2005 to 2007. In 2008 he
will begin a masters program in psychology (Learning and Behavior Analysis) at
CUNY Queens College.
Herbert Barry III, Ph.D., is a psychologist who
became a faculty member in the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy in
1963, Professor in 1970, and Professor Emeritus in 2001. From 1970 to 2001 he had an adjunct
appointment as Professor in the Anthropology Department of the School of Arts
and Sciences. He is a member of the
Psychohistory Forum and was president (1991-1992) of the International
Psychohistory Association (IPA). An early publication is “Relationships Between Child Training and the Pictorial Arts,” (1957) Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 54, pp. 380-383. One of his current research projects is on
the choice by novelists of the names of the fictional characters. Professor Barry may be contacted at barryh@pitt.edu.
Rudolph Binion, PhD, Leff Families Professor
of Modern European History, has taught comparative
history and psychohistory at Brandeis University since 1967. His most recent psychohistorical book is Past
Impersonal: Group Process in Human History (2005). A member of the Editorial Board of Clio’s Psyche, he may be contacted at
binion@brandeis.edu.
Sander J. Breiner, MD, is Distinguished Life
Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a professor of psychiatry
at two medical schools at Michigan State University, and one medical school at
Wayne State University. In addition to
being a Research Associate of the Psychohistory Forum, he is a Training and
Supervising Psychoanalyst, and author of over 100 scientific articles and
books, which include Slaughter of the Innocents: Child Abuse Through the Ages and Today (1990). Dr. Breiner may be
contacted at sjbreiner@comcast.net.
Kelly
Bulkeley, PhD, is a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union and teaches in
the Dream Studies Program at John F. Kennedy University, both in the San Francisco
Bay Area. He earned his doctorate in
Religion and Psychological Studies from the University of
Chicago Divinity School and is a former president of the International
Association for the Study of Dreams. He
has written and edited several books on dreaming, most recently Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative
History (NYU Press, 2008) and American Dreamers: What Dreams Tell Us
about the Political Psychology of Conservatives, Liberals, and Everyone Else (Beacon
Press, 2008). Professor Bulkeley may be
contacted at kellybulkeley@earthlink.net.
Paul H.
Elovitz, PhD, is a presidential psychohistorian trained in history, political science,
and psychoanalysis, who has been researching and writing about the candidates
and presidents since 1976. He is Editor
of Clio’s Psyche, a founding faculty member at Ramapo College who
formerly taught at Temple, Rutgers, and Fairleigh Dickinson universities, and a
founder and past president of the International Psychohistorical
Association. He has over 200 publications
and for over three decades has organized psychohistorical meetings in Manhattan
on a regular basis. He has published on
the dreams of historical personages such as Humphry Davy, Mary Wollstonecraft
and her daughter Mary Shelly, and Robert Lewis Stevenson, as well as historical
dream methodology. He studied dreams in
psychoanalytic training and later with Montague Ullman (1916-2008, a pioneer in
the field), ran dream workshops for years, devised a method of probing the
dreams of historical and public personages, wrote various articles and chapters
of books on dreams, and edited the dreams of others as a journal editor. Prior to working on Obama’s dreams, he did an
intense biographical and psychological portrait of the Illinois Senator,
published in the fall 2008 issue of the Journal of Psychohistory. Dr. Elovitz may be contacted at pelovitz@aol.com .
Kenneth
Fuchsman, EdD, is a historian who teaches interdisciplinary studies courses online at the
University of Connecticut, where he has been in a variety of capacities for
thirty years. Dr. Fuchsman writes on the
history of psychoanalysis and is currently exploring the dynamics of oedipality
in single parent and blended families.
He may be contacted at ken.fuchsman@uconn.edu or kfuchsman@gmail.com.
Florian Galler, a Swiss
macroeconomist with degrees in economic and social history, lives in
Zurich where he works as an economic teacher at the KV Zurich Business
School. Since his academic position is not directly related to
his psychohistorical research he considers himself to be a private, that is an independent, scholar. He is past-president of the German Society
for Psychohistory and Political Psychology and a long time member of the
Psychohistory Forum. He may be contacted
at floriangaller@bluewin.ch or through his homepage of
www.psychohistory.ch.
Judy B.
Gardiner has been researching and writing on the symbolism of her dreams since she
retired from a twenty-year corporate career.
She has been a panelist at the Association for the Study of Dreams and
has lectured on her dream message—the topic of Lavender: An Entwined
Adventure in Science and Spirit, her yet to be published novel. In
collaboration with Montague Ullman, whose last five years she
brightened, her work focuses on how dreams reveal both our internal and
external environments. Ms. Gardiner also
helped to contact some of those memorializing Monte. She may be contacted at
Jbgardiner@aol.com.
Lloyd
Gilden, PhD, did brain research and taught psychology at Queens College of CUNY in New
York City for thirty years before retiring from teaching. For the last ten years he has been president
of the Lifwynn Foundation while continuing his clinical practice. He may be
contacted at kllg729@aol.com.
Ted
Goertzel, PhD, is Professor of Sociology at Rutgers in Camden, a Research Associate of
the Psychohistory Forum, and a prolific author.
Among his books are Fernando Henrique Cardoso: Reinventing Democracy in Brazil (1999),
Linus Pauling: A Life in Science and
Politics (1995), and Turncoats
and True Believers: The Dynamics of Political Belief and Disillusionment (1992). In 2004 he and his niece Ariel Hansen updated
and co-edited his parents’ 1962 book, Cradles of Eminence: Childhoods of
More Than 700 Famous Men and Women.
Prof. Goertzel may be contacted at goertzel@camden.rutgers.edu.
Rajiv
Jhangiani, Ryan Cross, Sverre Frisch, Katya Legkaia, and Ekaterina Netchaeva, work
in the Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, Canada, under the supervision of Peter Suedfeld, PhD, where
they conduct research on political psychological topics including elite
decision-making, terrorism, genocide, and ethnopolitical conflict. Professor Suedfeld is a past president of the
Canadian Psychological Association and a recipient of the International Society
of Political Psychology’s Harold D. Lasswell award for "distinguished
scientific contributions in the field of political psychology.” Correspondence
may be addressed to Rajiv Jhangiani at rajiv@psych.ubc.ca.
Stanley
Krippner, PhD, is professor of psychology, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center,
San Francisco. He co-authored Dream
Telepathy with Montague Ullman, a book that reviewed their experiments at
Maimonides Medical Center where he directed the Dream Laboratory for a
decade. In 2002, he received the
American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Contributions to the
International Advancement of Psychology.
He may be contacted at skrippner@saybrook.edu.
Philip
Langer, PhD, is Professor of Educational Psychological Studies at the University of
Colorado. Together with Robert Pois (1940-2004) he published, Command
Failure in War: Psychology and Leadership (2006). Prof. Langer may be contacted at
Philip.Langer@Colorado.edu.
David
Lotto, PhD, a psychologist/psycho-analyst in Pittsfield Massachusetts and a
Psychohistory Forum researcher, frequently writes for these pages and the Journal
of Psychohistory. He may be
contacted at dlotto@ nycap.rr.com.
Wendy
Pannier, President (2005-06) of the International Association for the Study of
Dreams and a long time member of its Board’s Executive Committee, published Dream
Appreciation featuring Monte’s work from 1996-2002. She has conducted dream workshops and groups
in the U.S. and abroad and in recent years has developed programs to help
cancer patients work with their dreams and
nightmares. She also works with health
care professionals. Wendy may be
contacted at DreamWendy@verizon.net.
Mena E.
Potts, PhD, a University of Pittsburgh Competency program trainer, is the founder of
the Dream Center for Education and Research, a past board member of the
International Association for The Study of Dreams, and a Research Associate of
the Psychohistory Forum. Dr. Potts may
be contacted at Drmpotts@aol.com.
Burton Norman
Seitler, PhD, a clinical psychologist/ psychoanalyst in private practice and Director of
Counseling and Psychotherapy Services (CAPSR) in Ridgewood and Oakland, New
Jersey, is also Director of the Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Studies
Program of the New Jersey Institute for Training in Psychoanalysis in
Teaneck. Dr. Seitler serves on the Board
of Directors of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and
Psychology and may be contacted at binsightfl@aol.com.
Charles B.
Strozier, PhD, educated at Harvard, the University of Chicago, the Chicago Institute for
Psychoanalysis, and the Training and Research Institute in Self Psychology
(TRISP), is Professor of History at John Jay College and the CUNY Graduate
Center, as well as Director of the Center on Terrorism of John Jay
College. In addition, he is a
psychoanalyst and a training and research analyst at TRISP. In addition to three edited volumes with
Michael Flynn, his books include Apocalypse: On the Psychology of
Fundamentalism in America (1994, 2002), Lincoln’s Quest for Union: A
Psychological Portrait, 1982, 2001), and Heinz Kohut: The Making of a
Psychoanalyst (2001, it won the NAAP Gradiva Award, the Canadian Goethe
Prize, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize). Strozier, who was the founding editor of the
now defunct Psychohistory Review, is currently writing New York City
and 9/11: A Psychological Study of the World Trade Center Disaster and is
co-editing The Fundamentalist Mindset for Oxford University Press. Professor
Strozier may be contacted at charlesbstrozier@yahoo.com.
Hanna
Turken, NCPsyA, BCD, LCSW, is in the private practice of psychoanalysis and
psychotherapy in New York City and is a senior member of the National
Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP), as well as a Research
Associate of the Psychohistory Forum and a member of the board and supervisor
in the New York State Society for Clinical Social Work. Turken has published and presented papers at
national and international conferences on sexuality, culture, the role of the
father, sexual addiction, and other subjects.
She may be contacted at hjturken@verizon.net.
Robert Van
de Castle, PhD, Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia Health Sciences Center, is
former president of the Association for the Study of Dreams and the
Parapsychological Association. He is
author of Our Dreaming Mind (1994) and may be contacted at
riv@virginia.edu.
_________________________
Ó
Copyright 2008 Clio’s Psyche
Extracted from volume 15 no. 2 pages 51-69 of the new format version
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