About Suzanne Schreve

I am a Jungian psychotherapist and Sandplay therapist in training, a writer and co-founder of the creative platform BlackSalt. I offer Jungian psychoanalysis in Dutch and English, online and in person in Vorden and Zutphen, working with women and men and with a particular focus on women moving through defining transitions in their lives.

My work has grown at the meeting place of behavioural neuroscience, ecology and Jungian psychology. Across more than fifteen years of study, research and practice, I have remained interested in the same underlying question: how do body, psyche and world speak to one another, and what emerges when we learn to listen?

How the work began

From an early age, I was interested in the relationships between things and in the stories through which we make sense of them. I watched the natural world closely and followed a strong instinct that life was more animate, connected and mysterious than the explanations available to me could fully contain.

I studied Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where my interest centred particularly on ethology and the ways animals perceive, communicate and inhabit their worlds. I later completed an MA in Media at the University of Sydney and spent several years working in a corporate environment.

Depression in my late twenties returned me back to my first great love, the Earth. It eventually led me towards wildlife documentary filmmaking and back into direct relationship with animals, landscape and story—not as decorative surroundings to human life, but as presences with their own intelligence and agency.

Psyche, body and the feminine

Pregnancy and motherhood opened unknown rooms within me, both luminous and dark. During this period, I encountered Jungian psychology and a Sufi teacher within the same month; accompanied by bodywork, these traditions offered a language for forms of experience I had sensed but could not yet articulate. The mystical ceased to belong somewhere beyond ordinary life and became rooted within the body, relationship and the daily world.

This gradually brought me towards the study of the feminine psyche, oral storytelling and the relational nature of consciousness. My specialization in work with women grew from this meeting of personal experience, analytic training and research—not from an idea that all women share one psychology, but from an interest in how women’s lives are shaped by body, culture, relationship and inherited images of the feminine. I also followed the images shown in my own and other women’s dreams, depicting an individuation journey different from that of men.

Research and analytic practice

I am particularly interested in forms of psychological change that do not isolate the individual from her relationships or surroundings, but understand human life as part of a larger ecology.

This perspective informs the way I work. Body, imagination, feeling and thought are not treated as separate territories, while dreams and symbolic images remain connected to the concrete conditions of a person’s life. The feminine principle provides an important ground for this approach: receptive and relational, but not passive; capable of being supported by clarity, discernment, structure and action.

Education and professional formation

• BSc Behavioural Neuroscience, University of Sussex, United Kingdom

• MA Media Practice, University of Sydney, Australia

• Three-year program in Jungian psychoanalysis, Jung Academie Amsterdam

• Jungian Training, Two-year certificate, NAAP, affiliated with IAAP

• Sandplay therapy training in progress, NVST

• PBSK training, Con Amore

• NVPA member and registered with RBCZ

Writing and collaboration

Alongside my clinical work, I write essays in which mythology, feminine psychology, ecology, neuroscience and spiritual experience meet. Through BlackSalt and my collaboration with Mothership in Hamburg, I also explore how art and storytelling can give form to movements within the collective psyche.

I live in the Dutch countryside with my family, among fruit trees, animals and the seasonal lives that surround us. The more-than-human world remains integral to how I understand psyche: not as a background against which human life unfolds, but as part of the larger field of relationship to which we belong.

Working with me

I offer Jungian psychoanalysis online and in person, in Dutch and English. Sandplay is available only in person and is usually offered as a complementary part of an analytic process.

• Working with women

• Trauma and recurring patterns

• Read Anima Mundi