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What Is Depth Psychology?
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Historically,
depth psychology, from a German term (Tiefenpsychologie) coined by Eugen Bleuler,
has come to refer to the ongoing development of theories and therapies pioneered
by C. G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Alfred Adler. The modern versions of this tripod
are: *Jungian (includes Jung’s Analytical Psychology and Hillman’s archetypal psychology),
*Psychoanalytic (includes object relations and Kohut’s self psychology) * Adlerian
(from Adler’s individual psychology) . I would also emphasize the influence of
transpersonal psychology (which itself includes humanistic and far eastern currents),
although not all depth-oriented practitioners would agree, and existentialism,
which has worked its way into the psychotherapy world primarily via Rollo May,
and his protégé, Stephen Diamond.
Broadly speaking, depth psychologyoperates according to the following working assumptions:
- The psyche
is a process--one could say a verb rather than a noun, that is, partly conscious
and partly unconscious. The unconscious contains repressed experiences
and other personal-level issues in its “upper” layers and “transpersonal”,i.e.
collective, non-I, or archetypal forces in its depths.
- The
psyche is irreducible to either neurochemistry or some “higher” spiritual reality:
it is a “third” between matter and spirit that must be taken on its own terms.
This principle is known as “psychic objectivity” (Jung, Edinger). (Archetypalists,
who represent an offshoot of classical Jungian psychology, refer to the psyche’s
in-between quality as “liminal” or “imaginal.”)
- The
psyche spontaneously generates mythico-religious symbolism and is therefore spiritual
as well as instinctive in nature. A clinical implication of this is that the choice
of whether to be a spiritual person or not doesn't exist; the only question is
exactly where we put our spirituality: do we live it consciously or unknowingly
invest it in nonspiritual aspirations (perfectionism, addictions, greed, fame)
that eventually possess us by virtue of their ignored but frightfully potent numinous
power?
- Symptoms
represent important unconscious messages to oneself and should be managed—if necessary,
through psychotherapy or pharmacology or both—but not indiscriminately silenced.
(“The gods have become diseases,” as Jung wrote.) Symptom is one way by which the
psyche tells us that we're not listening to its deeper voices.
- There
is a “seat of meaningful experience” (Corbett) where the psyche’s personal and
transpersonal poles meet; this seat is referred to as soul. One of depth psychology’s
aims is to bring discussion of soul back into psychology. (See the work of Hillman,
Moore, and others.)
- Soulfulness, as I describe it, is considered a subjectivity that extends everywhere; everything
has a “within,” as Schopenhauer and Teilhard de Chardin believed. The depth practitioner’s
mission is to enrich the depth of life by being a witness to this subjectivity.
- Traditional
depth-psychological thought carried all the sexist misinformation and cultural
biases of the nineteenth century. The depth psychology of today critiques the equation
of gender with sex (because there are indeed two sexes, but in some cultures as
many as seven genders), dispenses with theoretical constructs that reinforce old
stereotypes about women and men (e.g., mothers as the primary source of psychopathology;
women are "passively yin" and men are "actively yang", etc.), and investigates the psyche
in its personal, biological, cultural, and archetypal context.
- All
minds, all lives, are ultimately embedded in some sort of myth-making. Mythology
is not a series of old explanations for natural events; it is rather the richness
and wisdom of humanity played out in a wondrous symbolic storytelling.
- For
the depth practitioner, goals of health or wholeness have less significance than
the cultivation of soulfulness (or “eudaimonism,” as Stephen Diamond terms the
conscious relationship to the daimonic life within). What may be risky, painful,
confusing, or even disastrous for a person’s conscious life might well be enriching
to that person’s soul.
- Personal
symptoms and conflicts contain a mythic or transpersonal/archetypal
core that when interpreted can reintroduce the client to the meaning of his struggles
(e.g., the pain of leaving home can be reimagined as the ageless adventure of the
wanderer setting out into the unknown). The danger in tending only to the transpersonal
is inflation of the ego (e.g., pie-in-the-sky New Ageism); the danger in reductively
focusing only on the personal is narcissistic devaluation of spiritual experiences.
- Work
on the personal level is a prelude to work on the transpersonal level; for that
reason, one must undergo various sorts of psychological initiations into adulthood—ideally,
with the help of wiser and more mature adults--in order to attain the maturity
to stand later encounters with those numinous, or highly charged, manifestations
of the transpersonal psyche which in aboriginal cultures have always been considered
signs of normality and vitality.
- Because
we have a psychical share in all that surrounds us, we are sane and whole only
to the degree that we care for our environment and tend responsibly to the world
in which we live.
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