Depth Jungian

What is Depth Jungian Psychotherapy?

Depth Psychology is the study of what lies beneath our awareness.  Why do we do the things we do? Different answers feel right at different times–the important action is asking the question. Sometimes the question leads to the release of emotional habits from our childhood. And sometimes our questions lead into the deepest and oldest places in our beings, where we encounter archetypal patterns that make our lives soulful.

Depth Psychology emphasizes creating a safe container to host the appearance of something mysterious, yet familiar and true.  The classical Greeks personified this energy as the goddess Psyche, and psychotherapy means “Psyche’s theater” or “The Soul’s place to be heard and find love”.

Carl Jung built a framework to organize our relationship to these energy patterns, these habits of thinking–a framework of symbols that repeat themselves in the accumulated folk wisdom of all world cultures.

Myths and fairytales are to cultures as dreams are to individuals.  Both inform the conversation between our self-reflective minds and the world of inner knowing.  By necessity, this dialogue takes place in the depth language of symbols.

Our inner knowing can’t breathe the harsh air of rational time and logic, so our conscious mind needs to learn to speak in metaphor.  So Depth Psychology is the tending of all kinds of symbolic conversations—the myths and stories of cultural anthropology, the somatic psychology of listening to our bodily sensations, the ecopsychology that tends the soul of the earth.

In practice, we sit and listen to the repeated dilemmas of daily life, to our dreams, humor, and childhood story, and to our longing for meaning.  We strive to hear through each of them the common metaphor for who we are and what we need to do in the world.  These motivating universal patterns permeate our work, our social life, our politics, and our problems.  Our choice is whether to pay attention to them and move with their flow, or to be tossed and jostled by their waves.

Besides talking and listening to stories, Depth Psychotherapy can involve a creative process to engage these symbols of healing.  Dream work, active imagination, myth, music, ritual, literature and art can all contribute to the dialogue of symbols between these underlying source-energies and our discerning consciousness. Working with these deep underlying sources of our actions can be a creative discovery of richness and meaning.  Some call it soul work.

 “The mind is the willing servant of the heart”