Biography

Michael Vannoy Adams lives in New York City, where he is a Jungian analyst in private practice and a professor at New York University.

Adams has written four books — For Love of the Imagination: Interdisciplinary Applications of Jungian Psychoanalysis (2014), The Mythological Unconscious (2nd revised edition, 2010), The Fantasy Principle: Psychoanalysis of the Imagination (2004), and The Multicultural Imagination: "Race," Color, and the Unconscious (1996) - as well as more than 50 articles on such topics as dreams, myths, metaphor, the imagination, archetypes, literature, art, American presidential politics, the economic unconscious, the Islamic cultural unconscious, racism, anti-Semitism, semiotics, and deconstruction.

In 2011, Adams was the keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Moscow Association for Analytical Psychology, where he delivered three lectures: "The Mythological Unconscious in Moscow: A Dream of a Russian-American Woman," "The Metaphor of Metamorphosis: Change in Myth and Psyche," and "O Baal, Hear Us: Active Imagination and the Mythological Unconscious."

In 2009, Adams interviewed the comedian and actor Sarah Silverman in a "Red Book Dialogue" at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City.

Adams 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 clinical associate professor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis (the first Jungian analyst appointed to the faculty in the history of that program). He is also a faculty member at the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association and the Object Relations Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.

Adams was appointed the first associate provost in the history of the New School, and for 30 years he was a faculty member. He was also director of a Master's degree program in Psychoanalytic Studies at the New School. Among the courses that he taught at Eugene Lang College of the New School were "Dream Interpretation," "Psychoanalyzing Greek and Roman Mythology," and "Psychoanalyzing Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Mythology."

He has also taught at the New York University School of Social Work, the Blanton-Peale Institute, the Institute for Expressive Analysis, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Brandeis University, Lafayette College, Villanova University, the University of Sussex in England, and Utkal University in India.

Adams has been a Marshall scholar in England and a Fulbright senior lecturer in India.

He received a B.A. from Texas Christian University, an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, a D.Phil. from the University of Sussex, 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 "For Love of the Imagination".