Bio

Dr. Steve Zemmelman
Dr. Steve Zemmelman

I am a Jungian psychoanalyst and psychotherapist who works with children, adolescents, individual adults and couples. I have been licensed as a clinical social worker (license # LCS 10933) since 1984. My education includes a bachelors degree from U.C. Berkeley in philosophy, a masters in social welfare from UCLA, and a doctorate in clinical social work from the California Institute for Clinical Social Work. I was certified through the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco as a Jungian psychoanalyst in 2009 and as a Jungian child and adolescent psychoanalyst in 2016.

During my forty-five years doing this work, I am honored to have been invited to enter the inner world of people at all points in the arc of life – early childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, and old age. These experiences have been my greatest teacher and through them I have had a chance to view much of the arc of life in its fullness. While the focus is always first and foremost on helping others along their path of individuation, the word C.G. Jung used to refer to the process of becoming one’s true self, the work has also become an expression of my own journey. The true self is already always within: often lost, it awaits contact and rediscovery. To locate it we dive into the depths. The way in that I offer is through a healing conversation, a reliable trusting relationship, that can help melt what has become frozen, to make more fluid what has become too static, allowing more creative living to proceed from where it has gotten “stuck” and move toward where it wants to go. It is my great privilege to assist people in discovering and walking their authentic individuation path – it is what helps me follow my own.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

                                                                                                                     T.S. Eliot (Four Quartets, 1943)

I have a passion for learning.  Heart and mind together can provide a path that deepens our understanding of what is needed for supporting the healing process: making contact with the wounded parts of soul that lives in us all, and helping mend those parts that are fragmented or broken. In addition to my ongoing work as an analyst and psychotherapist, I enjoy teaching and writing.

I am an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco, and an adjunct professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara.  Before that, I was a lecturer in the School of Social Welfare at the University of California at Berkeley.  I was a core faculty member of the Sanville Institute for Clinical Social Work and Psychotherapy for over ten years. Beyond the Bay Area, I have taught seminars and supervised clinicians in China, Taiwan, Israel, and India on topics in depth psychology including dreams, archetypes, initiation, the therapeutic relationship, attachment, ethics in psychotherapy, the development of psychoanalytic thought, Jewish mysticism, and the relationship of postmodernism to depth psychology.  You can get a sense of my clinical and scholarly interests from the list of publications under the “publications” tab on this website.

To set up an appointment please contact me by phone at (510) 207 1082 or send an email to me via the contacts page.