The Pacifica Virtual Experience

Friday, June 14, 2024

Are you ready to take the next step?

Thank you for taking the time to join us for Pacifica Graduate Institute’s virtual experience day! We welcome you to dive deep and learn about our various degree programs in the tradition of Depth Psychology, informed by the teachings of C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, Marion Woodman, James Hillman, and others.

You will embark on a journey of knowledge with presentations and conversations with our faculty and staff. As Pacifica president, Dr. Leonie Mattison, Ed.D., MBA,  has shared, “Our Pacifica Experience Days are a great way to discover your new learning community. Explore a rich array of degree programs, hear from world-renowned faculty, engage with our dedicated staff, and more. As Pacifica’s president, it is my delight, along with our Provost, to welcome your leadership, scholarship, creativity, and impact.”

Pacifica is an accredited graduate school offering master’s and doctoral degrees. The Institute has two beautiful campuses nestled between the foothills and the Pacific Ocean in Santa Barbara. All of Pacifica’s degree programs are offered through low-residential learning sessions that take into account vocational and life commitments.

You will enjoy a featured faculty presentation, program breakout sessions, and a Student Services panel. We hope you will consider applying to one of our academic programs using our free application link, and you may contact our Admissions Advisors at any time. Our admissions team is available to help you through every step of the application process. Enjoy the day!

Featured Presentation

Transgressive Alchemy: An Anzaldúan Reimagining of Soul-making and World-making

with Mary Antonia Wood, Ph.D., Core Faculty and Chair M.A. Depth Psychology & Creativity with Emphasis in the Arts and Humanities

The activist and the artist are molded, guided, and driven by archetypal patternings whose aims have intersected throughout time–very often within the same human being. The influential mestiza theorist, Gloria E. Anzaldúa was certainly an activist/artist, but she was also an alchemist, an alquimista. Combining the archetypal characteristics of both artists and activists, alchemists consciously enter the eternally shifting forces of creation and destruction. They blur boundaries between psyche and matter, between the imaginal and what we call reality. They fully expect (as Anzaldúa did) that their inner, esoteric operations are as powerful as their outer, explicit operations, and that the union of both can transform matter and realities.

This talk will bring Anzaldúa’s complex theory of conocimiento (particularly its recursive processes and stages) into dialogue with archetypal and alchemical theories of the psyche/soul as advanced by depth psychological thinkers such as C.G. Jung, Marie-Louse von Franz, Henry Corbin, and James Hillman. While it is well known that Anzaldúa was profoundly influenced by depth psychological concepts such as the shadow, the daimon/soul guide, and the mundus imaginalis/imaginal world, along with processes such as personification, active imagination, and soul-making, the value of her own revisioning and alchemizing of these concepts for our diverse contemporary world has yet to be fully understood, appreciated, and applied.

If you have any questions about this event, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Admissions Department at applicant@pacifica.edu or 805.879.7305.

Live Experience Schedule