....Starbucks management would not have made fools of themselves by printing invitations on their coffee cups to discuss big topics like racism in America. Consulting DP: "It's a nice idea, but you're the container people, right? You wouldn't serve super-hot coffee without an adequate container, would you? If you're serious about furthering these difficult discussions, how about spending some of your revenue on paying diversity consultants and community leaders to facilitate safe and effective discussion circles throughout Seattle and beyond, then collect and publish information on how well they do?"

....The US military would have reflected before rolling out a crowd-control weapon called Active Denial--that cost a lot but doesn't work. Denial never does.

....Huffington Post would have a entire section not only on sleeping (apparently Ariana doesn't get enough), but on dreaming and how to work with dreams and how doing so deepens consciousness and enriches life.

....The Greek government years ago might not have given a nod to all those Trojan Horse loans that by coming due (as all debts do, fiscal or psychic) have all but destroyed the Greek economy. And this time it's not the Trojans who are losing.

....AI researchers would be wondering, "What shadowy part of me seeks expression?" BEFORE giving intelligence to machines.

....Nobody would be trying to build a big ship named Titanic II.

....Eco-activists would be rousing public opinion through effective storytelling instead of relying on blaming, shaming, splitting, and all the other overused tactics that impress nobody these days.

....and the list goes on....

A depth look at oil production.

Introduction: Through a Mythic Rear-View Mirror

“The modern world is in some ways a dialogue between oil and water,” notes environmental professor David Orr in his book Earth in Mind:

Water makes life possible, while oil is toxic to most life. Water in its pure state is clear; oil is dark. Water dissolves; oil congeals. Water has inspired great poetry and literature. Our language is full of allusions to springs, depths, currents, rivers, seas, rain, mist, dew, and snowfall....We think of time flowing like a river. We cry oceans of tears. We ponder the wellsprings of thought. Oil, on the contrary, has had no such effect on our language. To my knowledge, it has given rise to no poetry, hymns, or great literature, and probably to no flights of imagination other than those of pecuniary accumulation.

What has oil done, then? Quite a lot, including founding what we like to think of as civilization as well as much as its industrial output. Orr looks at the cost:

Cheap oil and the automobile pitted community against community, suburban commuters against city neighborhoods. Money made from oil and oil-based technologies corrupted our politics, while our growing dependency corrupted our sense of proportion and scale. To guarantee our access to Middle Eastern oil we have declared our willingness to initiate Armageddon. We are now spending billions in fulfillment of this pledge even though a fraction of this annual bill would eliminate the need for oil imports altogether.

Oil has also brought a modernized mythology of the subterranean smoking and flaming to the surface.

Most people with a basic psychological education know about what Freud named the "repetition compulsion": the human tendency to repeat old patterns even when they disrupt and sadden rather than satisfy. Anyone capable of some degree of self-reflection quickly discovers similarities between friends, bosses, relationship partners with whom we repeat typical situations over and over until we realize what we need from these recurrences. Jung referred to the largely unconscious woundings that drive the compulsion to repeat as "complexes."

What goes unnoticed, especially in cultures frozen in an adolescent belief in the delusion of a wholly self-made life free of limitations, is that similar patterns of recurrence play out collectively, in the world at large. At that level the vehicle is not the personal complex, it’s a collective structure: myth, the cultural repository of ... READ MORE

Hi everyone,

I'm at work on an anthology with the working title Writings in Deep Psychology, and I thought I'd post a brief piece of it having to do with what constitutes "depth psychology." My anthology will include work from a number of pioneers, including Wundt (yes, Wundt: he did something for depth but most textbooks ignore it), Fechner (a tremendous nature mystic), William James, Pierre Janet, Freud and the Freudians, Jung and the Jungians, and work from Psychosynthesis, Humanistic-Existential Psych, and Transpersonal Psych. Cheers--

In 1910, psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coined the term “deep psychology” (tiefenpsychologie) to designate the psychoanalytic focus on the relations between conscious and unconscious. Freud, Janet, James, and other pioneers had uncovered vital psychological connections between symptom and symbol, repressor and repressed, conflict and wound, and dream and emotionality. In each case what showed on the surface presented upon closer investigation a ripple or two of deeper currents in the psyche.
    As psychoanalysis splintered and spread into multiple schools and perspectives, Bleuler’s term, now translated into English as “depth psychology” rather than “deep psychology,” narrowed as though by overcompensation to refer to approaches stemming from the work of Freud and Jung. Even now, graduate programs in depth psychology valorize Freud without referring to his intellectual debt to Janet and praise Jung while forgetting that an entire chapter written for but absent from Memories, Dreams, Reflections bore the title “William James.” Alfred Adler is lucky to get a mention by anyone but James Hillman.
    Furthermore, depth psychologists have overlooked, downplayed, or ignored deep research and practice in humanistic, existential, and transpersonal psychology as well as in psychosynthesis, whose founder, Roberto Assagioli, rightly complained about the need for a “height psychology” to supplement the ongoing “depth” emphasis on lower, darker, the early, and the archaic.
    “Depth psychology” remains a useful description of a specific stream of psychoanalytic descents, but restoring Bleuler’s “deep psychology” could foster cross-tradition consciousness of past and present explorations of the deepest ranges of human experience: “deep” not only as down or under, but “deep” as behind and within, as through deep walls or alight in a deep sky. 

What is Deep Education?

by Craig Chalquist, PhD

Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself.
-- John Dewey

I am English by birth, but I am Early World Man. And I live in exile from the world community of my desire.
-- H. G. Wells

What if, as depth psychologically-minded cultural workers, we labored against falsely separating the processes of individuation from those of liberation? 
--Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman

Some years back I began to realize that all my efforts as an educator tended to gather around a set of core aspirations that surfaced in and out of the classroom rather like recurring images in dreams.

Whether tracing the presence or “soul” of place (now called terrapsychology) as its ecological traumas echo into its inhabitants’ minds, tending a symbol appearing in the dreams of a group of dreamers, discussing how to detect and live with one’s personal myth, explaining how ancestry offers a legacy of guiding motifs encoded as metaphors, examining an institution as a complex system, or teaching ecopsychology and ecotherapy, my goal has always been, I now know, to work toward reconciliation of conscious self, personal unconscious, collective unconscious, nature, place, and planet.

In the same measure as the conscious attitude may pride itself on a certain godlikeness
by reason of its lofty and absolute standpoint, an unconscious attitude develops with a
godlikeness oriented downwards to an archaic god whose nature is sensual and brutal.
--CG Jung, Psychological Types

Fight the big corporations. Kill the multinationals. Break up theconglomerates and the consortiums. The problem of how to do thatpreoccupies more and more of us as helicopters hired with oil moneydrive natives from villages, artificial plant genes enter our rivers,and the bottom line defecates swallowed ecosystems as toxic waste.

Permaculturalists like to say, however, that “the problem is the solution.” So do depth psychologists. Informed by the psychological workof Janet, James, Freud, and Jung, we look upon symptoms as signals ofthings unlearned, indications of what we have yet to make conscious...

Read more on my home page at http://www.chalquist.com/transnationals.html