Pacifica will be launching a fully online track of the M.A./Ph.D. in Depth Psychology with Specialization in Jungian and Archetypal Studies in Spring of 2025. Enrollment is now open. I’m delighted to speak with Dylan Francisco, Ph.d., Co-Chair of the program.
Angela Borda: Congratulations on the imminent launch of the fully online track of the M.A./Ph.D. in Depth Psychology with Specialization in Jungian and Archetypal Studies (DJO) in Spring of 2025. I wondered if you could speak to what inspired this new online format?
Dylan Francisco: The new format grew out of our experience during the Covid years, in which we were all forced to go fully online. We had our concerns and worries of how well the curriculum would translate into a fully online delivery because the in-person, residential sessions with students, have always been a particular point of value for the program. We were wondering how the shift would affect both the students and the faculty. What we discovered is that the content of the program translated extraordinarily well into fully online delivery—so much so that the students who entered the program during the Covid years didn’t experience a sense of deprivation from working fully online. Quite the contrary, we witnessed the emergence of cohort chemistry, meaningful dialogue, and deep engagement with the course content through online facilitation. In a way that I don’t think anyone anticipated, while the fully online experience was certainly different, it was not by any means inferior to what occurs in the hybrid format (DJA) with in-person, residential sessions.
In addition, during the Covid years, we got an influx of students we’d never reached before with the program, who were able to enroll because there was no longer the need to travel to campus quarterly. That was the spark that made us want to utilize both ways of delivering the program, so those who deeply value the in-person contact can enroll in the hybrid program (DJA), and those who cannot travel, can join the fully online program (DJO).
DJO has the same level of accreditation as our residential and institute-wide programs. It was reviewed and approved by our regional accreditors WSCUC (www.wscuc.org).
Angela: Can you elaborate on the similarities and differences between the fully online DJO track and the hybrid DJA track? Will both continue to be offered? Is the course work the same?
Dylan: Yes. The fully online DJO track is identical in content to the hybrid DJA track. They’ll have the same readings and lecture content. The major distinction is that DJO requires no travel, while DJA requires students to travel to Santa Barbara for a four-day, in-person residential each quarter. The in-person time that is part of the hybrid program will become live zoom sessions in the online program.
Angela: As an alumni and faculty here, how do you anticipate Pacifica both reaching out to the world in a broader way, while still tending our roots of depth psychology and the unique atmosphere of our institute that formerly was something you had to be on campus to experience?
Dylan: I think the move to online delivery is a direct expression of our mission to tend soul in and of the world, because part of what is extraordinarily valuable about online delivery is that students get to inhabit the world they actually live in while learning this content. That gives it a daily, organic connection to their work life, family life, and community life, which doesn’t require them to get out of that context in order to learn depth psychology. That isn’t to say that the programs with residential requirements don’t have their benefits. The idea that a student has to relocate to learn from others can create a sense of separation between learning and life; we mitigate that as much as possible in our residential programs. But the online program embodies the value that life and learning should be inseparable, and we want people to be both intellectually enriched and prepared for actual life through the program. Life is the context in which we truly understand psychological dynamics and how we’re impacted by family, culture, and politics. The online program gives us an opportunity to take depth psychology to where people live, which is exactly where depth psychology is of most value.
Angela: The program describes archetypes as “universal principles and organizing patterns that pre-condition and animate human experience from the depths of the collective unconscious.” Can you speak to us about the value of archetypal theory in the present day, and what kind of career paths your graduates chose?
Dylan: The contemporary relevance of an archetypal perspective is that we see humans as pre-structured by certain needs, certain instinctual patterns in which psychological life unfolds naturally, and if you understand these patterns, you get a sense for what is non-negotiable in relationship to our shared psychologically make-up for as differentiated individuals with a human and more-than-human ecological and cosmological community. Jung talks about the archetypal necessity for wholeness, creativity, and spirituality. With an archetypal perspective, we recognize that people are going to attempt to meet these needs whether they’re conscious of them or not. An archetypal eye gives you a sense for what motivates and moves people beyond conscious intention. There are deeper energies in the psyche that need fulfillment, and we run up against them when our life is going contrary to our deepest psychological patterns. You can both recognize the intrinsic motivation of human beings and recognize when society or individuals fail to recognize these archetypal needs which results in symptoms that signify our misalignment our nature and nature itself. In this way, we can understand what it means to be whole and what arises when we’re living out of alignment with our wholeness.
With this context in mind, there are a lot of students who come into the program who are already in their professional life, as business and marketing executives, as therapists, as artists. They come to our program because they want to gain a sense for why people do what they do, what drives us and possesses us and captures us and results in people acting contrary to what they say they’ll do or expect themselves to do. So, the Jungian and Archetypal Studies program can apply everywhere, from understanding why people buy what they do, to what we’re attracted to in art, to what stories move us, and what shows up in therapy rooms. We both honor the sense that this program prepares people for their professional lives in multiple ways, and that depth psychology is larger than an economic outcome. We hold the both/and-ness that this program is applicable to many professional paths and that it is valuable for attending to life as a whole, beyond our work, to how we love and connect in community, to how we listen to our dreams, to what we feel compelled to do with our lives as a whole. On the other hand, there are also people who come into the program who are just entering the professional world, and from the program can become teachers, writers, public speakers, coaches, workshop facilitators. Some use the program as preparation for entering analytical training in Jungian psychology. For our program, vocation is something students can carry with them into the program, or it can be discovered along the way. We want our students to ask themselves what their education in depth psychology is asking of them—which can be related to an already established professional path or to a path that they may have to create for themselves and for the future?
Angela: What are you most looking forward to in the online cohort? What is your favorite class to teach?
Dylan: I’m looking forward to teaching a course that will be new to both programs. Indigenous Perspectives: Depth Psychology Beyond the West. It’s an opportunity for me and the program as a whole to recognize that depth psychology has deep roots in our human ancestry and in particular in indigenous communities that engage with the world with a sensibility for its enchantment, consciousness, and aliveness, which means that to be psychologically well requires living in relationship to all the other persons and energies that constitute the cosmos as a whole. I’m excited about this course because it opens depth psychology to a larger frame than the European context in which it is most often taught. It gives me an opportunity to trace its roots beyond the west, and to show what depth psychology can learn from indigenous cultures as it gets better at tending to the soul and our need to live well with the world as whole.
Angela: The program is now actively enrolling students for Spring 2025. What kinds of students are you looking for? People who already have an established career in psychology? People right out of their b.a.?
Dylan: We’re looking for students who are fully embedded in their lives, whether that means they have professional schedules or life demands or live in another country. This means people for whom traveling to California every three months is an obstacle to enrolling in the program and learning depth psychology at Pacifica. The quarterly travel costs time and money, and for certain people it is the difference between being able to attend Pacifica or not. We want the students who have always been interested in depth psychology and because of the travel requirement have not been able to attend. In the fully online program, Pacifica is coming to meet you where you are.
Angela: Thank you so much for speaking with me and best of luck with launching this wonderful new online cohort.
Now Accepting Applications for Spring 2025 – Online Cohort. For more information, click here.
Dylan Martinez Francisco, Ph.D. studied liberal arts at Georgetown University and psychology at Adelphi University before completing his Ph.D. in Depth Psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute—concentrating in Jungian and Archetypal Studies. His work focuses on C. G. Jung’s theory of archetypes—on archetypes as the deepest nature of the psyche and how they interconnect spirit, psyche, and matter as numinous and mythic powers that animate, govern, and structure the cosmos as a whole. Dylan grounds his work in indigenous/shamanic perspectives and practices that provide a primordial, holistic, and sacred worldview within which to understand the archetypal psyche, to embody its wholeness individually, and to serve it culturally through creative imagination.
Angela Borda is a writer for Pacifica Graduate Institute, as well as the editor of the Santa Barbara Literary Journal. Her work has been published in Food & Home, Peregrine, Hurricanes & Swan Songs, Delirium Corridor, Still Arts Quarterly, Danse Macabre, and is forthcoming in The Tertiary Lodger and Running Wild Anthology of Stories, Vol. 5.
