Dissertation Oral Defenses
Climate change has reached the point of a global crisis. The need for new paradigms of thinking and conceptualizing the problems is more evident than ever. This dissertation takes a decolonial paradigm of thinking and prioritizes the experiences of indigenous women of Saman, Iran of climate change through their environmental knowledge systems. This study is…
Contained in the earliest human stories and into present day exist multiple references to hearing the “voice” of nature, usually expressed musically and/or through feeling, motion, or presence. Recent research shows that these experiences are quite common and only rarely associated with pathology. This dissertation asks what is at the core of these auditory experiences…
This research illuminates legacies of relational ontologies and ethics of care through the experiences of women and queer folks from the South West Asian, North African (SWANA) diaspora and living in settler environments. Through performative ethnography, arts-based, and indigenous methodologies, the study will center their lived experiences and ancestral memory as expressed through ritual, relationality,…
Mother Earth and humans’ relationship to her have been revered and widely recognized throughout time and across cultures. However, she and our relationship with her gradually became shrouded by reductionistic thinking and narrow mechanistic mindsets. C. G. Jung esteemed the natural world—deeply convinced of the psyche–nature kinship and its essentiality to individuation—yet he withheld asserting…
Hate speech, verbal abuse, and verbal microaggressions have wide reaching and long-lasting traumatic biopsychosocial impact. This research examined a facilitated embodied artistic exploration of word woundings, the negative felt sense of a word. It drew primarily on the fields of somatic studies, depth psychology, and expressive arts therapy to explore how the words of others—from…
The Sola Busca tarot, composed of mostly male images, is based on thousands of years of Western androcentric philosophy and mythology. This has resulted in the tarot journey being viewed as a spiritual journey of individuation and transcendence for men, with females as the guides to men. Furthermore, the female figures found in most traditional…
This qualitative study examined the effects of being raised in a cult or closed, high-demand community on an individual’s innate sense of purpose, character, and calling. The exploration was guided metaphorically by the ancient Greek concept of the daimon—referred to by James Hillman (1996) as a “soul-companion” or “carrier of [one’s] destiny.” Second-generation former cult…
There has been an explosion of material written from the perspective of the trans identified (TI); however, little has been written about the lived experience of the remaining non-trans identified (NTI) partner. This dissertation was an exploration of the lived experience of partners who are not the transitioning partner as well as an attempt to…
A transdisciplinary study across the fields of depth psychology, somatic studies, arts-based research, ethnomusicology and music therapy, this research ultimately asks how listening to intentionally designed sound pieces might serve to stretch a listener’s windows of tolerance for hearing qualities perceived as Other. The term sonic stretching is used in this research to refer to…
his project proposes a means of rendering Jungian and post-Jungian anima and animus theories (animix theories) fully queer-compatible as a unified queer archetypal hermeneutic. It begins with a history of animix theory, focusing on previous efforts to make the anima and animus LGBTQ-compatible and those attempts’ shortcomings. The unworkability of animix theories arises from their…
This dissertation identifies “the myth of menstrual danger” and its development in Western thought, and how this myth continues to contribute to internalized menstrual shame. In the West, female bodies, and particularly their menstrual bleeding, have long been sites of fearful patriarchal fantasies. Evidence suggests, however, that menstrual blood was revered as part of a Great…
Since its beginnings, the phenomenon of consciousness has been immersed in the ocean of the unconscious, which is reflected in a psychic existence that is experienced throughout and beyond the physical world. The creative impulse was thus born, as a desire to emulate the living creation and its perpetual shapeshifting, resulting in the emergence of…
Mythologies of place reveal our beliefs about Nature, self and Other. In this time of pandemic and climate change, the imperative to recognize the power of Nature grows daily. To respect Nature’s agency, we need to deconstruct the structures of meaning we impose upon it. The legend of the lover’s leap—the fabricated story of an…
Transference Issues in the Treatment of Mexican American Women Who Were Sexually Abused in Childhood
This study explores the effect on therapy of positive and negative transferences experienced by Mexican American women during treatment to address their childhood sexual abuse. Individual interviews were conducted with six Mexican American women, all of whom received treatment for childhood sexual abuse. The resulting qualitative data was examined using interpretive phenomenological analysis. Positive transference…
A cultural complex assesses the heritable trait of high sensitivity in negative terms, leading those who identify as highly sensitive persons with a sense of shame and guilt. This study reviews current research on the trait as it exists and furthers an examination of it with a focus on high sensitivity’s manifestations in psyche’s other…
This qualitative study focused on the journey women undergo moving from normative body discontent, which is a term that describes the common state of suffering around food and body that many women in America experience, to making peace with the body. This experience with the body is subclinical and so culturally normative that it is…
The literature on the Latina’s individual experience recovery of mental illness is lacking. The study utilized Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009), to illuminate the lived experience of Latinas who have had major depression. The results of this study are categorized in three themes: the Latina’s experience of mental illness, healthcare landscape, and…
The ecological unconscious was articulated as primary to ecopsychology originally by Theodore Roszak; yet understanding how its contents and psychodynamics inform human approaches of relating to habitat has not been a central concern within the field. Confronting this complexity of ecopsychology, this study is an inquiry into a diverse selection of written texts that express…
This hermeneutic study traces the developmental theory that emerges from Erich Neumann’s writings. The research revisions reevaluates and consolidates the emerging theory, in the hope of reviving interest in Neumann’s writings, and to indicate his importance as a Jungian theoretician. This dissertation shows that Neumann’s archetypal developmental relational and metapsychological theory, which effectively supplements Jung’s…
This study described how participants came to terms with existential boredom in the course of their lived experiences of alcoholism and recovery. A review of the literature revealed a paucity of qualitative studies in the context of boredom and alcohol recovery. To that end, this was a qualitative study designed to contribute to the existing…
