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.

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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.  

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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.

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