Jungian analyst, Ann Belford Ulanov’s most recent book, The Psychoid, Soul and Psyche: Piercing Space-Time Barriers, explores Carl Gustav Jung’s concept of the “psychoid.” “Psychoid refers to unconscious processes that are unrepresentable in word or image,” Ulanov says. “We live them, but we don’t know about them. And they can make us feel mad, not angry, but crazy, and I believe they can also be a third source of healing.” Jung described the unus mundus, or “one world,” as more than psychological. It also has social, international, environmental, chemical, and cosmological properties. Ulanov is interested in the effects of experiencing the unus mundus, […]
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Spiritual Implications of Psychosis: How a Spiritual Perspective Can Provide Health Benefits to Mind and Body—Interview with Dr. Tanya Luhrmann
Is schizophrenia a “severe mental disorder,” as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO)? How might changing the perspective of the traditional western medical model, which labels certain symptoms as strictly pathological, ultimately transform those who are suffering? The Hearing Voices Movement (HVM) which originated in Europe teaches people with schizophrenia to respect their voices and to treat their voices as persons, says Dr. Tanya Marie Luhrmann, whose research seeks to understand the phenomenology of unusual sensory experiences often linked with schizophrenia. C.G. Jung used the imagination to work at the borderlines between dissociation and psychosis… Sharing some ideas that […]
Continue reading »Depth Psychology: Empowering Multicultural Women in the Wider World—An Interview with Media Mogul Nely Galán
Depth Psychology: Empowering Multicultural Women in the Wider World As a Latina and a self-made media mogul who has produced hundreds of television shows, headed a TV network, and generated a significant amount of income, Nely Galán ironically felt an odd sense of relief when the economy crashed in 2008, bringing many of her projects to a halt. In hindsight, Galán believes she had been feeling incongruent in her career because she was in a field where much of the focus was on achieving success, and where individuals were not valued for being their authentic selves. By that point in […]
Continue reading »The Value of Multi-Cultural Perspectives in Depth Psychotherapy: Interview with Dr. Matthew Bennett
Counseling is an applied healing art that helps us address suffering, enrich personal lives, activate our potential, to live more fully, and to develop more adaptive capacities to life in the view of Dr. Matthew Bennett, a psychotherapist and lecturer who teaches Counseling program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. More, psychotherapists and counselors that have a depth psychological orientation are prepared for a “broad spectrum slice of the human experience,” which for Bennett, includes the ability to be emotionally present in difficult emotional circumstances or even to simply better hold and tolerate emotionally powerful situations. Depth psychology is grounded in the […]
Continue reading »The Therapy Room and the Interactive Field: Dr. Joseph Cambray on Becoming a Supervisor in Depth
Psychotherapy is pervasive in contemporary culture. Even if you’re not a therapist yourself, if you’re taking the time to read this post, chances are good that either you or someone close to you has been involved in therapy at some point in their lives. And, while you may feel you have a good understanding of what happens in the therapy room, there may be more than meets the eye. Do you ever wonder, for example, what has to occur in the therapeutic process so that the basic experience is what it needs to be for both the client and the […]
Continue reading »Alchemical Active Imagination: Interview with Jungian Analyst Tom Elsner
Listen to the full interview with Tom here Watch the full interview here The brilliant use of alchemy as a symbolic language and process for psychological and spiritual development is arguably one of C. G. Jung’s greatest contributions to the field of depth psychology. While alchemy may appear to be a mystical—and mysterious—domain, Jung developed a powerful and inspired method for accessing it by entering into dialogue with the rich manifestations of the unconscious and applying it to our daily lives for transformation and growth. “True knowledge of oneself is the knowledge of the objective psyche as it manifests in […]
Continue reading »Depth Psychological Approaches to Suffering—Audio Interview & Blog post with Dr. Lionel Corbett
Listen to the full audio interview with Dr. Lionel Corbett here (27:12 mins) “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” ― Kahlil Gibran We are all intimately familiar with suffering. And, while we might wish it away when it is painfully present, it is a normal part of human life, Dr. Lionel Corbett, M.D., Jungian analyst and professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute reminded me when I recently sat down for a depth discussion with him on the topic. Etymologically, the word “suffering” comes from two Latin roots: sub—meaning “under”—and ferre, meaning “to carry or […]
Continue reading »The Shadow of Society and its Role in Mass Shootings
With the gradual development of our corresponding capacity for logical thinking in humans (that is, to “think about our ability to think”), we have both increased opportunities for consciousness but also increased challenges in the sense that we categorically seek to analyze, label, and put into buckets the things we don’t understand–sometimes becoming reductive and trapped in limited thinking. In order for us to transcend our current mythology and come to new creative awareness, we need to be able to look beyond established boundaries and facades to see what newand emergent concepts await. One good example of this is the […]
Continue reading »In the Face of Trauma: A Depth Psychological Approach
In the aftermath of the terrible tragedy of the Sandy Hook Newtown Connecticut mass school shooting, many of us are experiencing some degree of trauma–whether we knew the victims firsthand or not. In fact, there are many reasons we may feel increasingly traumatized in a culture where chaos seems to be the norm, rather than the unusual. Psychologist and trauma expert, Robert Stolorow (2010) designates the contemporary era an “Age of Trauma” because, according to him, the “tranquilizing illusions of our everyday world seem in our time to be severely threatened from all sides” (para. 2). He refers to ongoing and increasing global issues like […]
Continue reading »In the Face of Trauma: A Depth Psychological Approach
In the aftermath of the terrible tragedy of the Sandy Hook Newtown Connecticut mass school shooting, many of us are experiencing some degree of trauma–whether we knew the victims firsthand or not. In fact, there are many reasons we may feel increasingly traumatized in a culture where chaos seems to be the norm, rather than the unusual. Psychologist and trauma expert, Robert Stolorow (2010) designates the contemporary era an “Age of Trauma” because, according to him, the “tranquilizing illusions of our everyday world seem in our time to be severely threatened from all sides” (para. 2). He refers to ongoing and increasing global issues like […]
Continue reading »An Archetypal Perspective on Clinical Practice: A Summary of a Lecture by Jungian Analyst Michael Conforti
Recently I attended a teleseminar wich I found valuable and provocative and which inspired me to summarize it here. Please note that that this synopsis is based on my own understanding and interpretation of what was said on the call, and has not been reviewed by the presenter, Dr. Michael Conforti. ### Whether you are a clinical psychologist or psychotherapist, or simply an individual who had experienced therapy, the capacity to use an archetypal perspective is critical and greatly enriches the treatment, stated Dr. Michael Conforti in his introductory teleseminar in the Master Lecture series, “An Archetypal Perspective on Clinical […]
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