What is Depth Psychology?

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

C.G. Jung

Depth Psychology is based on the work of C.G. Jung and Sigmund Freud who recognized that our psyche is partially conscious and partially unconscious. Their work has been developed and expanded by a number of scholars such as James Hillman and Marion Woodman. Depth psychology is so named as it attends to what lies below the surface. It considers how the unconscious impacts our lives including our behavior, our relationships, and even our own suffering and problems. Everyone has a unique personal unconscious which is made up of forgotten memories, experiences, or parts of themselves that have been suppressed due to trauma. We can engage with the personal unconscious through working with our dreams, imagination, and by paying close attention to meaningful coincidences. The somatic and emotional often connect us to the unconscious as the body often holds aspects of the unconscious in its symptoms.

Along with having a personal unconscious, we each are connected to the collective unconscious which is a layer of the unconscious shared by all people from all times and places. Just as we are born with organs such as kidneys and lungs, we are also born with this collective aspect of our psyches. This layer is made up of archetypes, which were first identified by Plato. Archetypes are universal experiences such as death and rebirth, or the parent-child relationship, or the well-known hero's journey. We can often find these archetypal themes in story including ancient myth and contemporary film.

Depth psychology also recognizes that collective groups of people also have an unconscious which impacts group behavior. In order for individuals and groups to transform, they must make the unconscious conscious so that the unconscious does not rule their lives.

Depth psychology focuses on wholeness, rather than perfection, as a psychological goal. Human perfection is impossible, rather we should seek to re-claim those lost aspects of ourselves and our communities. This movement towards wholeness is referred to as the process of individuation.

It is in the depths that we find healing by meeting those parts of ourselves that we have disowned or repressed as these forgotten aspects of ourselves don't just disappear. Rather, they become unsupervised and continue to exist in a dysfunctional way. According to Jung, these parts of ourselves become “unconscious personalities", with lives of their own. They are laden with emotions which can overwhelm us and cause irrational behavior.

We often hear about having "complexes" such as a mother complex or a father complex. These are the unconscious personalities that can influence our behavior without us even realizing it. Not only do individuals have complexes, but so do groups of people, called cultural complexes. It is through working with and be-friending these complexes that we, as individuals and societies, find healing and wholeness. We also find freedom because as we make these complexes conscious, their control over our lives lessens.

The photograph is of the cave of the god of the Underworld, Hades, also known as Pluto. It is at the site of one of the most important rituals of ancient Greece, the Eleusinian mysteries.  The rituals were done in the greatest of secrecy; they are still a mystery today.  But from what little we do know, the rituals are based on the myth of Persephone who was taken by Hades into the underworld.  She was later rescued by her mother, Demeter, with the help of the goddess Hecate.  During the ancient rituals, the initiates were taken into the "underworld" in order to be cleansed and psychologically transformed.  The myth and the rituals reflect the process of psychological development for us today as the underworld is a metaphor for the unconscious. What exactly happens in the underworld is still quite mysterious.  However, in order to transform, we must venture into its depths.

I have visited the Eleusinian ruins twice in the last few years. They sit a half-hour outside of Athens, but are not on the main tourist trail. It is as if the mysteries want to remain hidden. On my first visit to the quiet grounds, my only human encounter was with three European film-makers. They’d set up microphones in the cave in order to create a film based on the sounds that they captured.

It brought to mind the mythic moment of standing at the threshold to the underworld, straddling the place of daylight and darkness. We can consciously choose to cross the threshold and enter the underworld, although it is not always a conscious choice. We often drop into the underworld through crisis, whether it is divorce, job loss, the death of a loved one, or a "mid-life crisis".

At the cave’s threshold, we have the opportunity to move towards the richness of the underworld knowing that it may not be the easiest choice, but it is certainly the richest. Often during our katabasis, our trip to the underworld, we are forced to look at our beliefs and ideals and to get rid of those that don't suit us anymore. Our authentic Self, or our soul, demands that it be given some attention, and our egos have to be sacrificed to some extent in order for that to happen. This time of "dethroning" the ego can feel like a disintegration of everything that we have known and been. Jung equated this process to the psychological equivalent of the ancient alchemists' process of turning lead into gold. It is through this process that we find our psychological gold and emerge from the underworld stronger and more whole and more in touch with who we truly are and what we truly want to be.

The microphones in the caves, reminded me that the underworld is connected to the upperworld and we can access it at anytime, not just when we are in crisis. We just need to listen to it through synchronicities, the imagination, dreams, myths, and images and symbols.