Practices and Frontiers of Somatic Depth Psychology
Courses in this domain focus on training in particular therapeutic and healing practices and on extensions of theory and knowledge that derive from connecting depth psychology with somatic psychology. Students will prepare and present material and casework drawn from their fieldwork or from their own healing practices.
Imagery in Somatic Studies I: The Technique of Active Imagination and the Practice of Dream Tending
DPS770, 2 units
This course will offer an introduction to Jung's technique of active imagination and how it has evolved into contemporary applications, such as the Dream Tending approach of Dr. Stephen Aizenstat. Students will start by reviewing the experimental evidence of the impact of imagery on the healing process. Students will learn to apply active imagination and Dream Tending as therapeutic measures for coping with medical illness and emotional disorders.
Imagery in Somatic Studies II: Embodied Dreamwork
DPS970, 2 units
Students will study and learn to practice a contemporary approach to the ancient practice of dream incubation, now called "Embodied Dreaming" by Robert Bosnak. Based upon the phenomenological perspectives of C. G. Jung, James Hillman, and Henry Corbin, the supposition in this practice is that all psychological events can be best understood as embodied phenomena.
Body Oriented Therapies
DPS751, 2 units
The term "somatic” refers to the awareness of our bodies as they receive inner and outer stimulation. Students will be introduced to somatic therapies that focus on bodily states of consciousness (breath, muscle tension, posture) in order to help clients reach an optimal integration of psyche with soma.
Trauma, Pain, and Dissociation
DPS850, 2 units
This course reviews new approaches to trauma therapy, the treatment of PTSD, ADHD, and other symptoms that are now being looked at from the perspective of a holistic integrative approach. The course also focuses on the nature of the healing process, including a review of health care practices within diverse cultural systems and historical contexts.
Chronic Illness, Terminal Illness, Conscious Dying
DPS951, 2 units
The culturally dominant allopathic medical approaches for treating chronic and terminal illnesses are increasingly criticized as being inefficient, cost prohibitive, and failing to contribute to the overall well-being of the patient. Students will review the alternatives to traditional practices, reviewing new practices for the training of nurses, doctors, and support personnel working in hospices and hospitals for the chronically ill.
Eros, Isolation, and Relationship
DPS953, 2 units
The loss of a love relationship has been known to cause “stress cardiomyopathy”, also called “apical ballooning syndrome.” This describes what happens when the brain, following an emotional trauma, releases chemicals into the bloodstream that cause rapid and severe heart muscle weakness (cardiomyopathy). These symptoms are very similar to those of patients having a heart attack. Since heartbreak often provokes that reaction, it is also known as the “broken heart syndrome.”
In this course students examine the ways that the dynamics of love and relationship may produce or prevent symptoms and contribute to healing. Students will learn to use a depth psychological approach which goes beyond the symptom, treating the pain of betrayal and abandonment, for example, as a push from nature to evolve into a new form of loving and relating. Instead of “treating” the heartbreak, the client is offered an initiation into the darker aspects of the Lover's archetype.
Non-Western and Indigenous Healing Practices
DPS952, 2 units
This course will focus on the theories and techniques of several different healing practices including shamanic practices from a variety of cultural contexts: curanderos, plant medicine healers, diviners, spirit healers, and others. As with similar reviews of western healing traditions, students will also examine these practices for clear connections to, and enrichments for, depth somatic psychology.
The Body in Literature: Themes of Sickness and Health
DPS950, 2 units
Stories from literature and from worldwide oral traditions abound with metaphorical and literal references to the symptomatic and wounded body as a rich context for suffering and remedy. The body becomes a narrative in its own right and, as such, leads us along through its experiences. Students in the course will read various works of myth and literature and learn how to critically interpret them from the perspective of somatic depth psychology. In addition they will critically reflect on the cultural role of these works in forming ideas about the body.
Mythopoetic Imagination: Arts and Expressive Therapies
DPS921, 2 units
The humanities have traditionally been the source of our most innovative ideas about the meaning of life, the beauty of the sensate world, the depth of the soul, and the birth of new values. The intention of this course is to develop an aesthetic approach that reconnects the arts with the art of healing.
Depth Psychology and the Sacred
DPS920, 2 units
When Jung said that all psychological problems are essentially religious problems, he was calling attention to the spiritual function of the psyche. In this course we examine the psyche’s capacity for sacred experience as it finds expression in religion, ritual, and encounters with the numinosum. Students will examine non-medical approaches for managing pain and symptoms due to mourning, heartbreak and the loss of meaning in life that comes from an impoverished sense of the sacred.
Ecopsychology: The Body on the Earth
DPS732, 2 units
The evolution of homo sapiens, both body and mind, is inextricably connected to everything on earth. Carl Jung even suggests that the collective unconscious is patterned from the body's contact with the seasonal rhythms, textures, sounds, and shapes of the natural world. Thus, to be a psychological being is to be an embodied being: to be firmly placed on terra firma, the ground from which all of us have emerged. Through lecture and experiential exercises, this course concentrates on the embodied psyche in nature as an important means for dissolving the artificial boundaries between body and earth.
Transference and Counter-Transference in Somatic Healing Practice
DPS851, 2 units
This course has an experiential component in which students develop a subjective awareness of the body and a capacity to constantly monitor and interpret their own somatic responses to clinical situations. Students learn to listen with an awareness of fluctuations in somatic cues during the narrative meaning-making process. Therapeutic skills and dynamics such as transference and counter-transference, diagnosis, interpretation, intervention, timing, and others are reimagined from an embodied perspective.
Depth Psychology and Behavioral Medicine/Health Psychology
DPS954, 2 units
This course will review the field of Behavioral Medicine/Health Psychology and frame it within the context of depth psychology. Topics covered will include the biopsychosocial model, strategies of intervention, cross-cultural aspects of understanding health/illness, somatization, the worried well, models of change, and environment and health. Particular focus will be given to understanding and treating disorders that typically present themselves in medical contexts including smoking, eating disorders, insomnia, hypertension, chronic pain, headache, irritable bowel syndrome, and stress syndromes. Standard western treatments will be explained combined with how depth psychology can both expand the understanding of these disorders as well as assist with their prevention and treatment.
Complementary and Alternative Medicine I, II, III
DPS740, 840, 841, 2/3 unit each
Western medicine has developed alongside many other systems of thought and many types of therapies that have been shown to be effective as either complementary or alternative approaches to healing and wellness. Some of these approaches, such as hypnosis, art therapy, aromatherapy, bioenergetics, biofeedback, music therapy, dance therapy, breath work, ayurveda, meditation, yoga, naturopathic medicine and many others, have begun to be shown as efficacious even when standard medical practice has exhausted its options. This sequence of short courses is available for engaging with practitioners in such diverse healing traditions.
Fieldwork, Practice and Case Presentation I, II, and III
DPS901, 902, 903, 2 units each
Throughout the third year of coursework students will participate in at least 60 hours of fieldwork or therapeutic practice that will further their own learning goals and provide an opportunity to integrate the theories, ideas, and experiences they have gained in the first two years. Fieldwork will involve entering into a particular community setting with the intention of studying some aspect of community experience that relates to the learning goals of this program. Practice will involve actually practicing therapeutically with clients or patients in a mode in which the student is qualified.
Students must formally propose their work in fieldwork or practice and have it approved by the faculty prior to beginning the first class in this sequence (unless the work being proposed is part of work the student already has underway). Students submit a log of completed fieldwork or practice hours and make formal case presentations during the on campus portion of this course.
Integration of Theory, Practice, and Teaching (Oral Comprehensive Examination)
DPS992, 2 units
Students develop and articulate individualized approaches to a practice of Depth Psychology with Emphasis in Somatic Studies, and prepare and deliver a presentation to faculty and students which will serve as the oral comprehensive examination.
Depth Transformative Practices
DPS997, 5 units
Various schools of depth psychology have created therapeutic contexts for personal transformation and/or healing. These practices are dynamically linked to transformative rituals and rites across cultures and through time. The provision of a witness, a guide, or teacher has been seen as essential to the containing vessel for such transformative experiences. During the first two years of the program, students are expected to engage in a minimum of 50 hours of depth transformative practice within a relational context. Latitude is given to students to choose the form of this practice in accordance with their needs and interests. Examples of such practice may include, but are not limited to, body work, breath work, individual depth psychotherapy, group dialogue work, facilitated vision questing, rites of passage, meditation, artistic engagement, or other psycho-spiritual practices. Students will be required to submit a log of recording the hours they complete, and a reflective essay addressing their experience of Depth Transformative Practices
