Bret Alderman
I graduated from the Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2013 with a PhD in Depth Psychology. Currently, I am adjunct faculty at Alliant University. I also have my own life coaching practice: Alderman Life Coaching (www.aldermancoaching.com). I have a critical interest in deconstruction and post-structuralism and a deep appreciation for the mythopoetic foundations of the psyche. As an exploration of embodiment, I practice contact improvisation dance and other forms of movement.
Biography
Bret Alderman is currently an adjunct professor at Alliant University and has his own life coaching practice: Alderman Life Coaching (www.aldermancoaching.com). He graduated from the Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2013 with a PhD in Depth Psychology. Bret is particularly interested in investigating the symbolic and symptomatic dimensions of epistemologies and their methods—the ways in which symptom and symbol manifest in our collective ways of knowing, our approaches, and research orientations. His writing is rooted in depth psychology, but also, more importantly, it is rooted in the depths of the imaginative psyche itself. Having been deeply influenced by the work of Carl Jung, he writes with the conviction that the imagination, when tended and cultivated, can provide knowledge and insight that is unavailable to us otherwise. In recent years he has also explored questions of embodiment through the practice of contact improvisation dance, authentic movement, holotropic breathing, and other modalities. Such practices have come to inform his understanding of embodied metaphor in everyday speech as well as his writing on semiotics, deconstruction, and post-structuralism.Education
-
PhD in Depth Psychology, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2013
Areas of Research / Professional Expertise
-
Depth Psychology, Jungian Studies, Ecopsychology, Phenomenology, Philosophy of Language, Deconstruction, Post-Structuralism, Contact Improvisation Dance, Authentic Movement, Embodiment, Life Coaching as an alternative to Psychotherapy.
Personal Interests
-
I have practiced contact improvisation dance for nearly a decade. It is an embodiment practice that helps inform my writing by grounding me in the immediacy of embodied experience.
Websites
Books
Photos
News
What people are saying:
By: Bret Alderman
What people are saying:
Bret Alderman’s new book, Symptom, Symbol, and the Other of Language is a scholarly inspiration that makesan important and much needed contribution to the place of Jungian studies in postmodern thinking about language and its absent referent. Approaching this issue as a collective cultural dream, he not only reveals the complex and archetypal patterns of this linguistic turn, but also shows how the absent reference in language is related to the broken connection between the embodied psyche and nature.
The style of his writing is evocative and inviting. It is a must read in a time when the ecological crises that we face are inseparable from the ways in which we think and speak of them.
Robert D. Romanyshyn, Ph.D.
Emeritus Prof. of Psychology
Pacifica Graduate Institute