An Interview by Angela Borda of Mary A. Wood & Susan Rowland, Part I of III

An Interview of Juliet Rohde-Brown, Ph.D., by Angela Borda: Part III of III

What do you most enjoy about teaching at Pacifica?

Juliet: The active engagement of the students who come here. They truly care and they are really interested. It created this reciprocal loop of learning that’s not passive. So I enjoy the level of depth that people come in with already, so we’re jumping off from a different point than you might find at other places where people just want a surface experience that will get them a job. We have people who are clinical supervisors, people who are very experience in clinical settings but they come to broaden their capacity to articulate what they already have a sense of knowing. It’s not exclusive to Pacifica, but we have people here who are making quite a difference in the world.

An Interview of Juliet Rohde-Brown, Ph.D., by Angela Borda: Part II of III

An Interview of Juliet Rohde-Brown, Ph.D., by Angela Borda: Part I of III

What attracted you to the field of psychology? Please tell me a little about the journey to being a teacher at Pacifica.

Juliet: I grew up with a brother with a brain injury and he opened me to consider that there’s much more to this human condition than meets the eye. I became fascinated with why people think and act the way they do. My temperament was inclined to be that way anyway. I was very shy and also drawn to the arts, so I originally thought that the arts would be my path. I did some acting and singing in the 80s. As I was coming into the 90s I was transitioning and asking questions of my life that led me to I want to do more purposeful work in the world, something that would be helpful to people. That can be done through the arts, but in terms of making a living, in my early 30s, I got involved in hypnotherapy and did a yearlong training and supervision in that area. So in the first part of the 90s, I was a hypnotherapist and I worked with people with medical issues like AIDS as well as with others.

L.A.-based artist David Orr will be presenting “ILLUMINED: Mandalas and Mythos Across Art and Time” to the Joseph Campbell Foundation Mythological RoundTable® Group of OPUS on Sunday, October 6^th from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at Pacifica’s Ladera Lane campus. This event is free and open to the public. For more info, visit opusarchives.org/events.

An Interview by Angela Borda of Pacifica Faculty Member, Michael P. Sipiora, Ph.D.

What is unique about Pacifica as a graduate institute that you most value? What drew you here from your teaching in Pennsylvania?

After graduate studies in philosophy, I earned my doctorate in phenomenological and archetypal psychology at the University of Dallas in the late ‘70s when James Hillman, Robert Sardello, and Robert Romanyshyn were the faculty. It was at the time that Hillman, who had a longstanding relationship with Pacifica, was first involved with the Institute and so I knew about the school back then. Before coming to Pacifica about 10 years ago, I was on the faculty at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh for over 20 years where I taught in their Human Science clinical psychology program. Like Duquesne, our clinical program here takes a qualitative approach to understanding the meanings that make up our psychological lives.

A blog post by Angela Borda based on an interview with Joseph Cambray, CEO-President & Provost of Pacifica

You’ve written a book and lecture on synchronicity and depth psychology. How do the two things relate and how did this develop as a focus of your research?

The initial work I did in this area came out of my experience as a clinician. Often with clients who had significant trauma histories, when we entered deeply into their backgrounds and the unconscious was activated, we would see synchronistic phenomena, meaningful coincidences. As I explored the phenomena, I realized that as Jung indicated, these types of events were occurring in various settings.  At that time, the study of complex adaptive systems had become a hot field, and I saw the way that approach could be directly applied to the phenomena I was investigating.  

by Joseph Cambray, CEO-President & Provost of Pacifica

"I think we’re moving toward a deeper understanding of the natural world and understanding our relationships to these intelligences that do not function in a cognitive way as humans do." -Joseph Cambray, Ph.D.

If you look around the world, there are not many academic institutions that focus on depth psychology. There are places in Europe and South America where it is included as a part of coursework, but Pacifica is the premier academic institution devoted to depth psychology. I also feel we need to go through a revision; the ideas inherent in depth psychology have become more integrated in the mainstream of culture, and the radical nature of the project needs to be revitalized. If depth psychology is about meeting the psyche at the margins, then where are those margins today and what do they look like? Certainly they are not static, there’s a revision that needs to occur.

A blog post by Melissa Ruisz Nazario based on an interview with Heesun Kim, LMSW. 

Many times, when prospective students visit Pacifica, they describe their experience as feeling “called” to the school, perhaps because of the campus, the community of people they meet, and oftentimes, Pacifica’s mission “to tend to the soul in and of the world.”

Similarly, when Heesun Kim, LMSW, a first year student in Pacifica’s Ph.D. Program in Depth Psychology with Specialization in Integrative Therapy and Healing Practices, first arrived at the Lambert Road campus in Santa Barbara, she felt it was a homecoming.

A blog post by Melissa Ruisz Nazario based on an interview with Heesun Kim, LMSW. 

About five or six years ago, Heesun Kim, LMSW, a student in Pacifica’s Ph.D. Program in Integrative Therapy and Healing Practices, was on the subway in New York City, and she noticed a woman sitting in front of her with tears streaming down her face. She was trying so hard to hold in those tears. It was a face that felt very familiar to Heesun, and she thought about the many times she had been in a similar situation.

“So I remember I was, a couple times, I ended up in the public bathroom, so I had to cry there,” she says. “And then I thought, you know, my grief, my sadness or all this sorrow needs to be respected, not in the corner of a public bathroom.”