Dissertation Oral Defenses

Postmodern discourse regarding gender identity calls upon the field of depth psychology, and primarily Jungian psychology, to reexamine its traditional dualistic constructs pertaining to gender so as to be open to including the experiences of queer, genderqueer, and transgender individuals. This research is particularly interested in honoring the personal narratives that define one’s self-understanding. Using…

This phenomenological study used a qualitative, hermeneutic analysis to explore the lived experiences of the moments of psychological change in five women and one man recovering from alcoholism. Interviews with the participants were coded thematically and analyzed in relation to a psychic movement that initiated sobriety. The data were compared to the process of transformation…

This theoretical research utilizes an imaginal approach to explore the transformational experience of empowering a hitherto silenced female voice. Archetypal and symbolic images of the mermaid and her myth are engaged to make visible the intersection between conscious and unconscious dynamics of the self-silencing. This brings into view the deeply rooted psychological themes of loss…

The purpose of the study was to explore the experience of aging and approaching elderhood for five members of the Baby Boom generation with an emphasis on community, imaginal ways of knowing, and contemplative journaling practices. The research problem noted that Baby Boomers are attempting to transition into elderhood during a particularly challenging economic, environmental,…

This hermeneutic theoretical dissertation examined Stanley Cavell’s (2003) interpretation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s work and its implications for clinical psychology. Cavell (2003) interpreted Emerson’s philosophy as an epistemology of moods that anticipated Martin Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. In this context, Emerson is seen as incorporating skepticism into his philosophy as an inescapable condition of human existence.…

This dissertation explores three fundamental ideas: (1) there is no self—self, and all of its trappings, are an illusion; (2) all people, on some level, know this to be true, and all people, on some level, perpetuate this illusion; and (3) anxiety is the engine that drives this illusion, that makes the self experience possible.…

This dissertation explores links between stories and well-being or dis-ease. Focusing on the symbolic meaning of the experience of endometriosis, the project develops a mythopoesis of feminine creative and destructive power as expressed through the mythology of Medusa and the text of an afflicted body. The study employs a hermeneutic phenomenology—an interpretation of experience validating…

Dogs categorized as pit bulls are entangled with American sociocultural and psychological dynamics, and alternately imagined as noble, vicious, and sweet.  Depth psychology holds that untended unconscious dynamics overwhelm situations and manifest in undesired ways such as violence and oppression.  This research explored the unconscious dynamics in pit bull phenomena and asked whether archetypal understandings…

This exploratory research conceived as ceremony makes an effort to rupture dominant narratives oppressing our exploration and meaning making of the universal lived experience that is called death.  In modern society, hegemony, commodification of the sacred, and the medicalization of an otherwise organic human unfolding contribute to the perception of a false separation in our…

This study utilizes interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) and derives meaning from the lived experiences of 5 alcoholic women with over 20 years sober from alcohol and attending Alcoholics Anonymous. Semi-structured interview questions are coded to expose themes detailing early childhood experiences, consequences related to drinking, the sense of self, and the search for wholeness. A…

Childhood sexual assault impacts individuals in the most intimate of ways and is considered one of the most destructive forms of trauma an individual can endure. Clinicians and researchers alike have acknowledged a range of physical, psychobiological, and spiritual outcomes related to childhood sexual abuse. Spiritually, sexual abuse can be so annihilating it has been…

The sleep paralysis nightmare is universally reported across cultures, from antiquity to modernity. Those who experience nocturnal assaults by demons, succubae, hags, and dark entities attribute them to evil spirits with various degrees of malevolence. Most report the experience as terrifying, overwhelming, mysterious and uncanny. Known in the neurocognitive literature as “isolated sleep paralysis” (ISP),…

This dissertation employs a hermeneutic methodology and a Jungian lens to examine the idea of golf as occupying liminal space. In anthropology, liminality is the transformative space in rites of initiation. In depth psychology psychic transformation occurs in liminal space. This study extends the concept to five loci of liminality: geography, history, the evolution of…

This critical hermeneutic case study of the Occupy movement and Occupy Portland considers indicators of cultural change and new social imaginary significations through the lenses of bodily relations to place and depth psychology’s psychoanalytic tradition. In Occupy, the convening power of mass self-communication technologies allowed the substitution of organizing properties of place for organizational capital…

This dissertation utilizes the archetypal and symbolic image of the Crone as a way to imagine and integrate present-day depth psychotherapy as a model for the treatment of stuck-ness. The Greek myth of Demeter is used as a mythical and archetypal background to explore the inclusion of the analytic third (Ogden, 1985, 1994, 2010) as…

This work is based on the belief that human beings need to feel that their lives have meaning, and at death to feel a sense of continuance. To experience these feelings, it is often essential to face our mortality and psychologically prepare for death. Symbolic immortality is one way to experience these feelings of meaning…

Common principles, or threads, are studied that are readily found in both spiritual traditions (including religion) and in the field of sustainability. Oneness, Living Simply, Purity, and Care and Heart are examined at length, while Awakening, Awe and Wonder, and Preservation of Life are covered briefly. Opposite principles—for example, Oneness versus Fracturedness, and Purity versus…

A cosmological view of the Jungian Self and psyche clarifies the ways that the symbolic language of astrology translates elements of one’s personal myth. This hermeneutic inquiry aims to offer a deeper understanding of the process of individuation by understanding nebulous archetypes of the unconscious through the framework of astrology. A Jungian methodology, close reading…

This hermeneutic phenomenological study explores the role of the sacred in engendering the courage to be embodied in adult survivors of severe sexual abuse. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach to depth psychology and mystical theology that utilizes the theories of D. W. Winnicott, C. G. Jung, and T. Merton to illuminate the dynamics of embodiment…

This dissertation endeavors to explore and describe the lived experience of music therapists’ relationships with their clients as it develops in individual music therapy sessions. Music therapy literature, reviewed with particular attention to its treatment of the psychodynamic conceptualization of clinical relationship, suggests a shaky marriage between music therapy and psychoanalytic thought, and the experience…