Teaching ‘origins of depth psychology’: overview and candidate‐members' experience

Abstract

In 2002 the North Pacific Institute inaugurated a new seminar series on the 'origins of depth psychology' for incoming candidate-members. This approach emphasized the historical and cultural embeddedness of analytic theory, practice and institutions. The seminar was experienced as enlightening and freeing, as well as sometimes painfully disillusioning. The overall feedback indicated that it fostered an opening of creative space for their education as analysts. This paper describes the structure, and some of the rationale and process of the seminar. It includes firsthand expressions of the candidate-members' experiences.

There is no ‘truth’ outside a context: implications for the teaching of analytical psychology in the 21st century

“…This is usually a good point to begin as I can point out Jung's disquiet about his own concepts of individuation and show how, when we are discussing causality, the emergentism and dialogism texts solve many of the problems with which he struggled. My task is made easier by a prior class, given for all candidates at the Seattle Analytical Psychology Institute in their first quarter of training, on the contextual background from which Jungian and the other analytic texts emerged (Ellenberger 1970; Shamdasani 2003; Hinton 2006).…”