What is Depth Psychology?
The simplest definition of depth psychology is the study of the unconscious. It was psychiatrist and founder of analytic psychology, Carl Gustav Jung, who offered this easy-to-understand explanation of the contents of the unconscious, as “everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do; all the future things that are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness: all this is the content of the unconscious.”
Depth Psychology draws on much more than just psychology, however. It integrates ideas from a wide variety of disciplines, including the arts, literature, philosophy, mythology, music and other disciplines. The term was actually first coined by Zürich psychiatrist and professor Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli Asylum in Zürich where Jung first started his psychiatry career. It was subsequently used by both Sigmund Freud and Jung and their followers. So not just Jungians practice depth psychology.
Unearthing the often mysterious contents of our unconscious can by hard to do on our own sometimes, and that’s why depth psychotherapists can help get you started. To learn more, see my next blog post.
What do depth psychotherapists do?
In essence, we help psychotherapy clients bring their unconscious thoughts, motivations, and behaviors into conscious awareness. As Jung explained, until people are able to do this, the unconscious can direct their lives in unwanted ways: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Your therapist may begin by helping you look for signs from your unconscious, whether it’s through the study of your dreams, artwork, writings, your symptoms, your relationships and even those meaningful and mysterious coincidences known as synchronicities.
Ways to access your unconscious
While there are many ways to intentionally bring into conscious awareness what is unconscious in us -- free association and meditation are two obvious ones you may already be aware of – Carl Jung developed something unique called active imagination. Active imagination involves an activity in which you concentrate on a dream or an image that might arise through expressive arts or dreams, for example, and then focus on, without judgment, whatever image pops in your mind. Jung called this the beginning of a dialogue between your ego and your unconscious.
What usually happens next is that the image in your mind shifts spontaneously in response to your focused attention. “In this way conscious and unconscious are united,” Jung described, and he called this the transcendent function. He observed that when we can hold in awareness both our conscious attitude and this unconscious content, which might be just the opposite of what our conscious mind is thinking or how we are behaving, our psyche will respond to the tension between the two with the spontaneous creation of a third new state. This third unifies or transcends the polarity between the ego and unconscious. The transcendent function, according to author and depth psychotherapist Thomas Moore, sparks the coming together of both “mysterious depths of the soul as well as conscious understanding and intention.”
When you allow images to pop in your mind from fantasies or dreams or art or music or a walk in nature, powerful symbols and mythological motifs, called archetypes, can sometimes emerge. I’ll cover archetypes and other mysterious depths in my upcoming blog posts.