Dissertation Oral Defenses

This inquiry will focus on the psycho-spiritual embodiment of the Africanist female experience and the intersection of race and gender as it relates to the potential of individuation and transformation. This study uses an Africanist-centered form of autoethnography called Nkwaethnography to examine the ongoing transformative experience of conscious and unconscious awareness of long held patterns…

This study compares contemporary comic books to historical examples of esoteric and religious texts in order to evaluate how comic books might operate as mystico- visionary texts. Mystico-visionary texts are texts that seek to catalyze the author’s own experience of mystical revelation within subsequent readers of that text. By finding similarities between contemporary comic books…

Using a hermeneutic methodology, this study reorients psychic multiplicity and individuation toward a more fluid model of consciousness without an ego complex for the field of Jungian depth psychology. It asserts the argument that the psyche is a multiple consciousness via the concept of subpersonalities. Contrastingly, in his analytical psychology, C.G. Jung posited the ego…

This hermeneutical study traverses the epic Sumerian poem “From the Great Above to the Great Below” as a metaphor for the heroine’s journey into the underworld of patriarchy within the Christian tradition. The Goddess Inanna emerges as an archetypal hierophant for twenty-first century women who choose a path of individuation in response to the vocational…

This dissertation explores the necessity of a mutually beneficial relationship between humanity and the life with which we share this planet, incorporating the precepts of depth psychology and deep ecology to support the mental health of the individual and the continued advancement of the human condition. The concepts of the shadow, the trickster, and Wetiko…

This hermeneutic study researches the archetypal experience of divorce through alchemy. Divorce is a psychological ordeal that is painful, persistent, and an assiduous institution of American culture. The decision to divorce a soulmate creates a unique and under analyzed psychological gap between the subjective experience of divorce and the psyche’s archetypal factors of disconnection from…

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a rapid transition to telehealth for the delivery of mental health services. Furthermore, teletherapy is known to be as effective as in-person psychotherapy for children and adults. However, little is known about the use of sandplay therapy via telehealth; sandplay is traditionally offered in person. The purpose of this study…

This study explored the psychological impact of Western medical diagnosis, intervention, or interaction from the patient’s perspective. The history of Western medicine was critiqued and explored with special attention to the loss of the corporeal soul. Concepts of the medicalized body, medical gaze, and the social construction of Western medicine were presented. Six participants were…

This dissertation joins the vibrant chorus of feminist voices agitating for reform in cisheteropatriarchal understandings of sacred biblical texts. Where these texts have remained intransigent to the winnowing of social change, they dislocate woman from the Divine Feminine and negate her holistic development into a sacred self. Three biblical texts are examined for clues to…

This study is an exploration, primarily in a therapeutic context, of the awakening of apparently dormant archetypal potentials through the anomalous phenomenon of past-life hypnotherapy in an attempt to heal trauma from present and past lives. Although past lives are now well documented in depth psychological literature, the topic remains a polemical subject in academia.…

This depth psychologically oriented ethnographic research has been conducted on Jeju Island in South Korea for twenty-eight months and explores how Jeju’s shamanic traditions have sought to heal intergenerational trauma surrounding the 4.3 Massacre, which killed 30,000 civilians from 1948 until 1954. This study examines human aggression and violence, spiritual connections with ancestors, and how…

The purpose of this study was to highlight the voices of women of color in the field of psychology. This study discovered common themes, common elements, and protective factors that are needed to encourage completion of licensure. The study utilized the voice-centered phenomenological method to understand the unique lived experiences of women of color who…

Adolescent and young adult suicide is pervasive in the modern social landscape despite a multitude of efforts toward prevention. Although many studies have made in-depth attempts to understand the act, this study provides alternative ways of working with suicide, including depathologizing the discussion and utilizing novel methods to increase understanding of the language of suicide…

This study investigates the psychology of the warrior woman who is driven to be a part of military combat ground forces. Since 1970, U.S. military laws and policy have evolved, allowing women to fill a wider array of military occupations. Beginning in 2015, women have been advancing toward serving specifically in combat roles. The research…

Creativity, distinct from artistic talent, reveals a relevant role during early development on subsequent adult experiences of creative living in this study, providing an original contribution to the field of clinical psychology.  The formulations about the nature of creativity, in the sense applied to this research, was developed by Donald Winnicott, who was a British…

Chronic pain is a complex, whole-being experience reflective of a multidimensional matrix of psychoemotional, neurodynamic, and physiological elements. Management of chronic pain has been confounded by its relationship with opioid misuse, leading to interest in nonpharmacological approaches to pain management. This uncontrolled, interventional mixed methods pilot study examined the impact of a program of somatic…

This study explored the experiences of three lesbian couples who used reciprocal in vitro fertilization (RIVF) to build their families. Semi-structured interviews provided the primary data, which was analyzed using the Listening Guide (LG) method. Although numerous voices emerged for each individual and within each couple, all informants, in one or more voices, expressed the…

While childhood is crucial to psychoanalytical understandings of adulthood, developmental theory is neglected within the Daseinsanalytical literature. Given the historical and theoretical relation between Freud’s work and that of Medard Boss, the founder of Daseinsanalysis, the present research will reconsider psychoanalytic perspectives on childhood in terms of Daseinsanalysis. The task is to identify key elements…

Law enforcement officers have reported the difficulty they experience dealing with critical incidents, particularly with crimes against children. Officers using maladaptive coping mechanisms to manage emotional trauma may develop stress disorders. This study served to assess adaptive and maladaptive coping mechanisms in law enforcement officers working as first responders to crimes against children and to…

Wounding affects everyone, but what happens when the wounds are invisible, ancestral, or have been abandoned? Furthermore, when one accesses the wound, it can bring to the surface shameful feelings too painful to articulate. This art-based research examines the marginalized parts of the soul that have been repressed, overlooked, or abandoned—the wound. It suggests that…