Dr. Erik Goodwyn supervises long-term psychotherapy for psychiatric residents, is an instructor for medical students and residents, and also provides clinical care at the University of Louisville, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He has authored numerous publications in the field of consciousness studies, Jungian psychology, neuroscience, mythology, philosophy, anthropology, and the psychology of religion. He vlogs about dreams, memory, visions, myth, story, and the imagination on his YouTube channel, The Imaginarium.
In this freewheelin’ episode, Dr. Erik talks about his idea of the Invisible Storyteller, a hypothetical character we all have that puts together the dream story as if commenting on our current situation. Its creative capacity and use of images is nothing short of astounding.1 He explains how dream meaning is sometimes contained within When/Then causal connections in the dream narrative, of “when this happens, then this happens,” a method of deducing storytelling-type meaning that can be attributed to Freud and then later elaborated by Carl Jung.
Dr. Erik also talks about his upcoming fantasy novel, “King of the Forgotten Darkness: A Raven's Tale Fantasy,” and how his life’s work informed its writing and thematic structure.
The Invisible Storyteller is outlined in Dr. Erik’s book, “Understanding Dreams and Other Spontaneous Images: The Invisible Storyteller,” where he applies a contemporary interdisciplinary approach to dream interpretation, bringing cognitive anthropology, folklore studies, affective neuroscience, and dynamic systems theory to bear on contemporary psychodynamic clinical practice.
The Invisible Storyteller