Ph.D. in Depth Psychology Emphasis in Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy Informed by The Humanities & Interdisciplinary Studies
Depth psychotherapy moves beyond a limited clinical paradigm to a broader frame that includes enriched connections to healing practices informed by literature, myth, spirituality, and a multitude of interdisciplinary studies.
Psyche in Nature
DPP 732........ 2 Units
The ethos of a psyche-centered psychotherapy is not merely a construct of interiority. It has important implications for how we situate our lives within the context of a field or system. If we depart from the fantasy of the autonomous ego and engage instead with the image of ego as a constellation within the psyche, our imagination about the nature of our individual relationship to the world also shifts. This course focuses on the ecological view of human interactions, including the particular interaction of psychotherapy. The metaphors of ecology offer valuable directions for understanding systemic perspectives on couples, family, group and organizational psychological practice as well as providing lenses through which to regard our relationships.
Psychotherapy and Culture I: Diverse Healing Traditions
DPP 830........ 2 Units
This course places the practice of psychotherapy in dialogue with diverse traditions of counseling and healing from one or more non-Western cultural settings. By examining our similarities and differences with other traditions students can begin to appreciate the deep common ground that unites all forms of work with the psyche. Students also begin to see the culture-specific attitudes about pathology and health that tend to become codified in clinical practice.
Psychotherapy and Culture II: Culturally-Based Symptoms
DPP 831........ 2 Units
Cultures and communities themselves may be symptomatic, and symptoms felt at the personal level are often culturally based. Alienation, poverty, oppression, violence, and trauma sometimes provide the context for psychological development that often become the focus of treatment as if it were intra-psychic in origin. This course examines the special nature of psychotherapy in the context of culturally-based stressors. It may include focus on issues related to work with patients from diverse backgrounds, problems of language, and the role of the therapist in cultural criticism and culture change.
Literary Foundations for Depth Psychotherapy
DPP 835........ 2 Units
When Aristotle wrote of tragedy in his Poetics in the 5th century BCE, he observed that some cathartic or therapeutic cleansing occurred by means of poetry. His discovery has remained true of poetry's power to assist psyche's healing by acknowledging its shadowed contours. Classic narratives reveal an ability to discern the movement of soul in its struggles to know itself and its relation to a larger world order. Mythopoesies is the term for this engagement of soul with narrative to create a poetic psychotherapy by imagining new classic texts of fiction.
Psyche and the Sacred
DPP 920........ 2 Units
The psyche’s capacity and affinity for sacred experience, as expressed in religion, ritual, and encounters with the numinosum, continually remind us of the importance of a spiritual consideration in all psychological work. Jung once said that all psychological problems are essentially religious problems. If true, this idea becomes especially interesting to practitioners of depth psychotherapy in the ways it calls for a revision of our notions of self, suffering, pathology, and of approaches to treatment. This course explores ways that a depth psychotherapist might work with the religious function of the psyche.
Psychotherapy Informed by the Mythic Tradition
DPP 921........ 2 Units
Freud, Jung, and many of their critics and followers have consistently and directly recognized the natural connection between mythology and psychology. Mythology is often seen as a kind of psychology in its use of images, stories of struggle and transformation, and in the way it connects us across boundaries of culture, time, and space. Students examine this historical connection between mythology, psychology, and psychotherapy as well as the mythic base of psychology and the healing arts.
Psychotherapy, Medicine and New Science
DPP 963........ 2 Units
Brain research, holographic theory, and cosmology studies, together with new developments in quantum physics, give rise to radical developments in our knowledge, thus extending our worldview toward a new psychophysical foundation of reality. These developments profoundly affect issues such as the mind-body relationship. Students explore these intersections of thought with specific focus on the implications for psychotherapy and emerging new paradigms of psychological healing and transformation. We also give consideration to exciting new developments in psychobiology and neuroscience, including the evidence for neurogenesis in connection with psychotherapy and other healing arts.
