The Workshop: Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, was fond of saying, “The dream is an existential message.” What he meant was that the dream presents me with a picture of my existence - and hence is a way of understanding my way of being in the world. It also challenges me to live more fully and creatively in the present.

Participants are invited to bring a dream or several dreams to the workshops. This can be an old dream or a new dream, a dream fragment or a repeating dream. If you cannot remember your dreams, we can still work with this. Bring a fantasy or other image. You should leave with a glimpse into the “existential message” about your life.

Dreams come alive in AEP work through eanctment. Enacting dreams permits us to get at the lived experience at their heart without distorting them through interpretation or reduction. Thus we learn to respect the language of the dream - and the creative potential of the dreamer. Each part of the dream, including inanimate objects, is recognized as a character - and a part of the dreamer’s psyche. Creative experiments may expand the dream so that a resolution to deep level issues becomes possible. Participants in the workshops gain an understanding of AEP principles and techniques that will be helpful in exploring their own dreams and those of their clients.

The Workshop Leader: Betty Cannon, Ph.D., Boulder (Colorado) Psychotherapy Institute president and co-founder, has worked with individuals, couples and groups for over 30 years and trained psychotherapists for over 20 years. She is professor emerita of the Colorado School of Mines and senior adjunct faculty at Naropa University. She is a member of the editorial boards of three professional journals and an internationally known author, lecturer and workshop presenter. She is the author of many articles, book chapters and an internationally recognized book on existential therapy, Sartre and Psychoanalysis.

The Introductory Friday Night Presentation introduces basic AEP techniques and principles. The audience will be invited to view videotaped clips of AEP dream work and to participate in some experiential exercises.

The Intensive Weekend Workshop goes much more deeply into AEP principles and techniques, permitting you to observe dream workings as well as to try them out with fellow participants. This should bring a more thorough understanding of AEP dream work together with more confidence in using this approach to work with clients. Space is limited to allow everyone to participate fully in the intensive workshop.


What is Applied Existential Psychotherapy? AEP interlaces the insights of contemporary existential and psychoanalytic/psychodynamic approaches with techniques inspired by Gestalt and other experiential therapies. Many existential and psycho-analytic approaches do not fully engage the body, while many existential and experiential approaches fail to take into account family of origin issues that get in the way of authentic relationship and full presence to being. AEP works with both. Body and process are emphasized along with verbal material and content in a way that challenges clients to work through old issues and make new choices that may lead to profound changes in their way of being in the world.


Review of Betty Cannon’s Sartre and Psychoanalysis: “Every once in a rare while a text comes along whose intellectual impact is such that it makes one want to shout: 'Please, whatever you do, READ THIS BOOK!' Betty Cannon's Sartre and Psychoanalysis is such a book.... Her arguments and conclusions, as well as being stunningly original, shed light not only upon psychoanalytic practice, but (if implicitly) upon psychotherapeutic practice in general….I cannot praise this book too highly. For anyone interested in existential analysis, and most especially anyone practising such, Cannon's text is required reading. Thankfully, it is also pleasurable and eloquent reading, admirable for its clarity, authority and lack of academic pretension. In other words: a text destined to become a classic in the field." Ernesto Spinelli, author of Practising Existential Therapy: The Relational World - and other influential books on existential psychology, in Existential Analysis, July-September 1992, no. 3.