Sharon D. Johnson, PhD

I am a Los Angeles-based educator, depth psychologist, widely-published journalist, and member of the Writers Guild of America, West, Inc. I have been doing personal dream work for 23 years. I also teach my original Dream Work course at UCLA Extension's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), and am a frequent lecturer on depth psychology and dreams. In September 2015, I was a facilitator at “Valuing Black Lives—The First Annual Global Emotional Emancipation Summit,” hosted by Hon. Karen Bass (D-California), presented by Community Healing Network, Inc. and the Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi), where I led and reported on small working-group discussions about emotional emancipation for people of African descent. My doctoral dissertation, The Fire That Genius Brings: Creativity and the Unhealed Companionship Between Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes (2011), is a depth psychological analysis of Hurston and Hughes’s autobiographical writings; correspondence; creative literature; and social and family dynamics, resulting in new information and understanding about them; their friendship; and their creative collaboration that departs from existing scholarly consensus. My essay, “Conscious Daughters: Psychological Migration, Individuation, and the Declaration of Black Female Identity in Daughters of the Dust”--a depth psychological examination of director Julie Dash’s seminal film--is included in a forthcoming (March 2016) anthology from the University of South Carolina Press commemorating the 25th anniversary of the film's release. I am a consultant to the award-winning Ohio-based non-profit organization, Alchemy, Inc. I graduated from Barnard College with a B.A. in the Program in the Arts--Writing. I also earned an M.A. in Media Studies from the New School for Social Research, and a PhD in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, the premier accredited doctoral program in the field.

October 2015