How do YOU explain Depth Psychology?

Many of us who consider ourselves "depth psychologists" still debate what is the best way to explain exactly what depth psychology is. I'm wondering if we can compile a list of the ways people describe it to see if something works well for others.

I have written about it for years and finally consolidated my thoughts in to a formal paper (you can read it on the Articles section of this site), but it takes around 10 pages for me to explain it there.

After reading that paper, my sister-in-law, Erika, as a layperson, recapitulated it (as follows). I actually thought it was a pretty good analogy. Erika says:

You show someone your house, and you walk through all the rooms. You don't open the closets, because they already know what a closet is. Psychology opens the closet doors. Some Psychologist take everything out and reorganize the closet. Depth Psychology looks at everything in the closet- to find why its been put there in the first place.

It also seems to me that you are saying the unconscious is as important as the conscious. Or said a different way, Dreams, thoughts, feelings, and desire should be given as much validity as living, breathing, eating.

I also get the idea that Jung was saying that a person comes with all of these working parts (body and soul). Denying thoughts feelings etc. (soul) leaves a person unfinished/ unbalanced. Why not give those things validity and the person can grow as a whole by leaving the analogous closet door open?

....Not bad! What are your ideas/descriptions of depth psychology??

Thanks for your interest and sincere dialogue, Dmitri. I so appreciate your active engagement in the community. I guess I would say it's not that the land wasn't paid for so much, I'm just witnessing one possible chain of events that removed the land from the hands of its first inhabitants and eventually led to it hosting the house in which I grew up.

Though I didn't have any part or say in those events, that land is still irrevocably THE foundation of my own being in a huge way because I grew up on it and have an intimate relationship with it---even though I am now living in a different state. I think I am simply honoring what is "beneath me" and therefore beneath my sense of self in so many ways (since, as you pointed out, what makes me "me" is likely more than "just a closet"! There is so much history there embedded into that land--most of which was before my lifetime and I will never know it, but it is still somehow embedded in me now, too.

Replies

Bonnie Bright May 20, 2010 at 5:09pm

Thanks for your interest and sincere dialogue, Dmitri. I so appreciate your active engagement in the community. I guess I would say it's not that the land wasn't paid for so much, I'm just witnessing one possible chain of events that removed the land from the hands of its first inhabitants and eventually led to it hosting the house in which I grew up.

Though I didn't have any part or say in those events, that land is still irrevocably THE foundation of my own being in a huge way because I grew up on it and have an intimate relationship with it---even though I am now living in a different state. I think I am simply honoring what is "beneath me" and therefore beneath my sense of self in so many ways (since, as you pointed out, what makes me "me" is likely more than "just a closet"! There is so much history there embedded into that land--most of which was before my lifetime and I will never know it, but it is still somehow embedded in me now, too.
Bonnie Bright May 20, 2010 at 10:54am

Dmitri! Well-said! I have to agree with you--especially the part about inhabiting the house from bottom to top. I wonder how far we could go, though. Now that I think about it, don't ya gotta wonder where the land came from that the house is sitting on?

When I was four, my parents bought a undeveloped plot of land in Idaho and cleared the rocks and sagebrush in order to build a house and farm. Its only recently through my depth studies that I ever wondered how they came to be able to "buy" that land. Certainly the Native Americans who lived there were long since gone. It was probably owned by the Bureau of Land Management by then and of course, by our cultural standards, my dad had no reason NOT to assume he could buy it and own it. Of course, back to the analogy: its starting to sound like my "house" may be built on at least one complex that is connected to displacement....

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