Dear Pacifica Community,

The beginning of February marks the start of Black History Month, a time to celebrate Black Excellence, a term used to describe the individual contributions, perseverance, achievements, and successes of the Black community. The 2023 theme for Black History Month, set by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), is Black Resistance.

Dear Members of the Pacifica Community,

On behalf of the Board of Trustees and the Presidential/CEO Search Committee, we are proud to announce Dr. Leonie Mattison as the incoming President and CEO of Pacifica Graduate Institute.

The margins of consciousness have shifted. The original conception of “the unconscious” as a meaningful and influential force needs reformulation. Ideas associated with depth psychology have been increasingly adopted into the mainstream of modern culture, such as the ubiquitous influence of unconscious processes on behavior or archetypal elements operating in society. But if depth psychology is to retain relevancy, it needs to be contemporized and revitalized—What might that mean? And how might we go about it?

Dear Pacifica Community,

On behalf of Pacifica Graduate Institute, I express deep sadness and profound concern for the sovereign nation of Ukraine. Ukraine's people want to decide their own destiny. The tremendous suffering being inflicted on the Ukrainian people is unwarranted, unacceptable, and wholly undeserved. We stand and join much of the world community in deploring the senseless suffering of this unjust war, echoing the international community’s calls for de-escalation and an immediate resolution of hostilities.

Dear Pacifica Community,

For the past several weeks we have witnessed with growing alarm and deep sadness the impact of another major hurricane (Ida) with its ancillary storms, tornadoes, and flooding in a large swath from New Orleans through the Mid-Atlantic States, into the Northeast with tremendous damage and loss of life. Pacifica has staff, faculty, students, and alumni who the storms have, in some cases, severely affected. We are most grateful to our Alumni Association for offering psychological assistance and support through its Care Line. The Care Line is open 24/7 and can be reached by phone at 805-679-6163 or by email: AlumniRelations@pacifica.edu. But even with this compassionate offering, communications have been rendered much more difficult by the storms with power outages.

At the same time, we in the west, especially in northern California and Oregon, have experienced severe droughts, followed by horrendous fires. There is a collective, felt sense of being out of balance in/with nature. Though natural disasters recur on a regular basis, the frequency and intensity of these events in the 21st century seem to be escalating well beyond the “normal” of previous years.

Statement on the Violence in Atlanta (3/19/21)

The terrible murders of eight individuals in Atlanta this week, including six Asian women leave us in the Pacifica community with great sadness, grief and distress for the rising levels of hated-filled violence in our society and for the pain and suffering in the Asian community. While we do not yet know all of the details, there has been a clear pattern of escalation of violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) over the last year: According to NBC news, citing the advocacy organization Stop AAPI Hate, there have been about 3800 reported incidents of hate-based crimes targeting members of AAPI communities across the country, many against women, since last March when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Racist and gender-based crime have absolutely no place in our society. Pacifica Graduate Institute unequivocally condemns this violence and the hate that fuels it.

Statement in Solidarity with the Asian and Pacific Islander Communities (3/9/21)

In the midst of the many changes our society is undergoing and as part of our ongoing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts, we wish to explicitly state the following:

Pacifica Graduate Institute unequivocally condemns the racism, violence and hatred directed against the Asian communities across the nation, which has soared during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Hate and racism have no place at Pacifica Graduate Institute or anywhere else. Pacifica Graduate Institute stands in solidarity with the Asian and Pacific Islander communities in denouncing all forms of hate, discrimination, and intolerance.

Statement on Addressing Systemic Racism (6/3/20)

At Pacifica Graduate Institute, we are deeply distressed and aggrieved by the senseless, ongoing violence directed at black members of our communities. We grieve Mr. George Floyd’s death as the latest hate-motivated tragedy in a society riven by dehumanization and lack of empathy for fellow citizens based on mindless racist projections. This deep stain on the American soul has a long and dreadful history, and despite great efforts to educate, reform, retrain, add body cameras to police attire, there has not been effective, lasting change in overall behavior by police departments throughout the country. The legacy of systemic racial oppression continues to shape how we perceive ourselves and one another, and must actively be countered if its virulence is to be checked, and its lethal effects transformed. The results of this oppression include the differential health care being offered during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which African Americans and other people of color are suffering mortality at a much higher rate than white populations, especially those with better access to health facilities and PPEs.

by Joseph Cambray, PhD, Pacifica Graduate Institute President

Pacifica Graduate Institute has been the premier academic institution devoted to depth psychology from its inception about 50 years ago. Our overarching vision integrates multiple, diverse perspectives on the human psyche—the totality of our being, including conscious and unconscious mental life as well as how we are embedded and engaged in our environments, cultural and natural; traditional referred to as the soul. We offer a wide range of transformative programs designed to enrich soul-centered knowledge (taking psychology as the logos of the psyche) through experience and disciplined practice. Though our various programs have differing emphases, we draw upon many shared foundations, including but not limited to psychological processes based on the notion of an “unconscious” component to our mental life; psychotherapeutic, environmental, and social justice best practices, in conjunction with mythological, archetypal, and cultural studies, drawing upon the humanities as well as the sciences and the arts. While other select academic programs scattered around the world include depth psychology as a part of coursework, none are so profoundly rooted in this discipline. This is part of what makes Pacifica unique, as do our extraordinary faculty and staff, and the unique settings of our two campuses.

A guest post by Mary A. Wood, Co-Chair, Engaged Humanities and the Creative Life Program

“And no bird weeping a lament / no bird crying the song of its honey voice / in the leaves of Spring’s many flowers / could outrun him / Pan, in song” –“Hymn to Pan,” The Homeric Hymns

"Masked God." Mixed media collage, by Mary A. Wood

Normalizing Non-Ordinary Experiences: An Interdisciplinary Approach. A blog post by Melissa Nazario, based on an interview with Ann Taves, Ph.D. by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

Listen to the full audio interview with Ann Taves here. (approx. 28 minutes)

If you began hallucinating, perhaps seeing or hearing things that no one else could perceive, how would you interpret this unusual experience? Ann Taves, Ph.D., professor of Religious Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara and presenter at Pacifica’s upcoming Trauma and Transcendence conference in June 2018, became interested in this topic back in the mid-80s, when there were a lot of people who were being diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. She had a friend who had been abused as a child and who apparently had multiple personalities, or dissociated identity, as the clinicians now call it. Ann says that because she came from a very rational sort of family, it had never dawned on her that our minds could experience changes like what it does with disorders, and she credits knowing her friend and hearing her talk about her experiences as the point at which, for Ann, the door first opened into the range of what was possible.

Video Transcript: 

Dr. Alejandro: Bernardo, I'd like to ask you: what is human vocation? And what is the origin of the term and of the concept behind it?