Dissertation Oral Defenses
Throughout the ages, humankind has continuously explored the unseen world in an attempt to make sense of the mysterious cosmos and our place within it (Eliade, 1964/1992; Lockhart, 2010; Tarnas, 2006). Standing upon the shoulders of ancient philosophical and spiritual traditions, Jungian depth psychology and energy healing therapy alike engage with this subtle world based…
What we are witnessing on college and university campuses today threatens institutional values of open inquiry and critical thinking. As a unique and vital part of society, institutions of higher education were once viewed as laboratories for ideas. Today’s display of intellectual intolerance, hostile discourse, and stifled free speech in the name of “safety” threaten…
This Jungian arts-based research (JABR) engages a dream image with the Jungian process of active imagination to weave a tapestry, retrieving image-symbols from the cultural unconscious. Hermeneutic amplification of these image-symbols reveals, explores, and challenges a cultural complex woven into the fabric of the U.S. public school system. The research exposes two areas of what…
Alienation from nonhuman nature has severe clinical implications. Both depth psychologists and ecopsychologists have called for therapeutic approaches that reorient Westerners to the more-than-human world and their fundamental relatedness in it. This study presents the Jungian notion of individuation as one such deeply relational framework with reconnective potential, and it explores the individuating practice of…
This dissertation delves into unhoused women’s experience of artmaking in community at the Downtown Women’s Center (DWC), Skid Row, Los Angeles, California, USA. Weekly mixed media workshops were held to explore the women’s experiences and any potential benefits. The study integrated mindfulness and art-based heuristic inquiry framed by nondualism which is grounded in interconnection and…
Yogic teachings depict the aim of life as reuniting with Spirit, and Paramahansa Yogananda (1982, 1995, 2011) expounded on the deep meaning of living one’s life in this way. Although the practice of meditation has been shown to allow for greater access to experience outside of functional ego consciousness (Bruce et al., 2010; Nanda, 2005;…
Tupac Amaru Shakur, the celebrated icon of hip-hop music and film, who was tragically murdered in 1996, is widely recognized as a sociocultural and artistic phenomenon. As a means of exploring the archetypal themes present in Shakur’s life and personality, this hermeneutic study analyzes Shakur’s artistic output, including his songs, poems, interviews, texts, and film…
The focus of this study is to contribute to the Western understanding of ayahuasca, a plant medicine of the Amazonian Basin, by focusing on the oral teachings of a Peruvian vegetalista, an Indigenous medicine person. This study contextualizes ayahuasca as a cultural artifact that reflects and reproduces the cultural-historical context in which it appears, not…
Re-Storying A Sense of The Sacred With A Mythological Herd: An In-Depth Study of Horses In Mythology
Stories and images of horses are present in the earliest recorded forms of human imagination, from paintings on cave walls in the Paleolithic era, to war horses depicted in Homeric epics, and sacrificial horse rituals described in sacred texts. Mythical horses carry gods, elevate heroes, and transport the sun across the heavens. Hindu and Indigenous…
This inquiry will focus on the psycho-spiritual embodiment of the Africanist female experience and the intersection of race and gender as it relates to the potential of individuation and transformation. This study uses an Africanist-centered form of autoethnography called Nkwaethnography to examine the ongoing transformative experience of conscious and unconscious awareness of long held patterns…
This study compares contemporary comic books to historical examples of esoteric and religious texts in order to evaluate how comic books might operate as mystico- visionary texts. Mystico-visionary texts are texts that seek to catalyze the author’s own experience of mystical revelation within subsequent readers of that text. By finding similarities between contemporary comic books…
Using a hermeneutic methodology, this study reorients psychic multiplicity and individuation toward a more fluid model of consciousness without an ego complex for the field of Jungian depth psychology. It asserts the argument that the psyche is a multiple consciousness via the concept of subpersonalities. Contrastingly, in his analytical psychology, C.G. Jung posited the ego…
This hermeneutical study traverses the epic Sumerian poem “From the Great Above to the Great Below” as a metaphor for the heroine’s journey into the underworld of patriarchy within the Christian tradition. The Goddess Inanna emerges as an archetypal hierophant for twenty-first century women who choose a path of individuation in response to the vocational…
This dissertation explores the necessity of a mutually beneficial relationship between humanity and the life with which we share this planet, incorporating the precepts of depth psychology and deep ecology to support the mental health of the individual and the continued advancement of the human condition. The concepts of the shadow, the trickster, and Wetiko…
This hermeneutic study researches the archetypal experience of divorce through alchemy. Divorce is a psychological ordeal that is painful, persistent, and an assiduous institution of American culture. The decision to divorce a soulmate creates a unique and under analyzed psychological gap between the subjective experience of divorce and the psyche’s archetypal factors of disconnection from…
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a rapid transition to telehealth for the delivery of mental health services. Furthermore, teletherapy is known to be as effective as in-person psychotherapy for children and adults. However, little is known about the use of sandplay therapy via telehealth; sandplay is traditionally offered in person. The purpose of this study…
This study explored the psychological impact of Western medical diagnosis, intervention, or interaction from the patient’s perspective. The history of Western medicine was critiqued and explored with special attention to the loss of the corporeal soul. Concepts of the medicalized body, medical gaze, and the social construction of Western medicine were presented. Six participants were…
This dissertation joins the vibrant chorus of feminist voices agitating for reform in cisheteropatriarchal understandings of sacred biblical texts. Where these texts have remained intransigent to the winnowing of social change, they dislocate woman from the Divine Feminine and negate her holistic development into a sacred self. Three biblical texts are examined for clues to…
This study is an exploration, primarily in a therapeutic context, of the awakening of apparently dormant archetypal potentials through the anomalous phenomenon of past-life hypnotherapy in an attempt to heal trauma from present and past lives. Although past lives are now well documented in depth psychological literature, the topic remains a polemical subject in academia.…
This depth psychologically oriented ethnographic research has been conducted on Jeju Island in South Korea for twenty-eight months and explores how Jeju’s shamanic traditions have sought to heal intergenerational trauma surrounding the 4.3 Massacre, which killed 30,000 civilians from 1948 until 1954. This study examines human aggression and violence, spiritual connections with ancestors, and how…
