Why Pacifica Now? A Meditation & Imagining

Posted by Krystyna Knight on Jul 24, 2020 10:54:41 AM

"All true things change and only those things that change remain true.” C.G. Jung

People are carefully thinking about educational opportunities during this time of radical uncertainty. They hope to strategically find their way through a world of increasing complexity and rapid, unpredictable change. Grasping the nature, order, and the way of the world has long been a goal sought throughout higher education. Today, however, this question is highly problematized and traditional certitudes of the Academy are hotly contested.

As the present scale and pace of global change is enormous, universities currently experience social pressure to justify their relevance, not only regarding liberal arts and humanities offerings, but also the ostensible importance of entering higher education during a time of record unemployment. How should higher education institutions respond to a world of the COVID-19 pandemic, systemic racism, an increasing global mental health crisis, economic volatility, and planetary deterioration in ways that make matriculation a sagacious decision? This post is simultaneously my meditation on existing conditions at Pacifica Graduate Institute and an imagining of where I hope it soon will be.

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Posted in: Current Affairs, transformative, Education, Pacifica Graduate Institute

Pacifica Graduate Institute: Statements on Addressing Systemic Racism

Posted by Guest on Jun 3, 2020 5:47:56 PM

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.

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Posted in: Current Affairs, Pacifica News, Pacifica Graduate Institute

Pacifica’s Vision: Psyche in the 21st Century

Posted by Guest on May 29, 2020 5:16:17 PM

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.

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Posted in: Current Affairs, Pacifica News, Pacifica Graduate Institute

Interview with Murray Stein for Pacifica Graduate Institute

Posted by Krystyna Knight on May 8, 2020 3:06:37 PM

On April 1, 2020, Dr. Murray Stein, internationally known Jungian analyst and author, was interviewed by Dr. Robert Henderson on the subject of the coronavirus found here.  In the interest of exploring further the powerful images and ideas found in this seminal interview, Pacifica will offer a series of new interviews with Murray, designed to address the pandemic from a depth perspective. In this first interview, Murray will be interviewed by Dr. Pat Katsky, a Jungian analyst, Pacifica faculty member, and former Pacifica provost.

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Posted in: Current Affairs, Trauma, pandemic, world issues

The Return of Pan: The Nakedness of Power, Panic, and Pandemics

Posted by Guest on Apr 9, 2020 3:54:02 PM

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

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Posted in: Current Affairs, Trauma, Engaged Humanities, pandemic

"Our Hearts Open With Love" | Statement on the Thousand Oaks Tragedy by Dr. Stephen Aizenstat

Posted by Melissa Ruisz Nazario on Nov 8, 2018 12:05:42 PM

By now, you've likely read or heard the news of the mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, California. Dr. Stephen Aizenstat, Founding President and Chancellor of Pacifica Graduate Institute, shared this letter regarding the tragedy with many in our community, and we wanted to share its message of hope with all of you.  

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Posted in: Current Affairs, Trauma, Social Justice, Psychology, graduate school, depth psychology, Pacifica Students, Pacifica Graduate Institute, collective trauma, relationship, relationships, love, Spiritual

A New Therapy for Politics?

Posted by Nikole Hollenitsch on Nov 17, 2017 12:32:41 PM

Pacifica was honored to have Andrew Samuels, internationally recognized political commentator and theorist from the perspectives of psychotherapy and depth psychology, present at the October conference Up Against the Wall: Politics, Community Psyche. Dr. Samuels presented "A New Therapy for Politics?" and we are delighted to share that lecture with the Pacifica community.

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Posted in: Current Affairs, Pacifica Events, clinical psychology, depth psychology, Pacifica Graduate Institute, politics

Photography and Writing: Into the Heart of Traditional Cultures in Times of Global Change

Posted by Nikole Hollenitsch on Nov 7, 2017 9:41:44 PM

Photography: Into the Heart of Traditional Cultures in Times of Global Change. An Interview with Writer and Photographer, Michael Benanav, M.A. A Guest Post by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

Michael Benanav is a critically-acclaimed writer and photographer who has traveled to a lot of places that are well off the beaten path, often finding himself in remote mountains and landscapes, walking, being in nature, and living quite simply. There, in the wilderness, he often runs into nomads, and he quickly became fascinated by their way of life. Benanav, whose work has appeared in publications like The New York Times, Geographical Magazine, Lonely Planet Guidebooks, and CNN.com, was naturally drawn to spending time with them.

These profoundly archetypal lifestyles inevitably appear in Benanav’s work. In his first book, a travel narrative entitled Men of Salt: Crossing the Sahara on the Caravan of White Gold (2008), he joined one of the last working camel caravans in the world, which runs an ancient salt trading route in the Sahara desert in Mali. Leaving Timbuktu, the route veers 500 miles north into the vast desert to salt mines located “in the middle of nowhere,” hundreds of miles away from any village. There's no electricity, no telephone; not even fresh water, Benanav reports.

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Posted in: Current Affairs, Connecting Cultures, Ecopsychology, art, indigenous psychology

A Time for Community

Posted by Nikole Hollenitsch on Oct 10, 2017 11:30:12 AM

Over the past several months our nation has faced a series of traumatizing events: catastrophic storms and fires, social upheavals over injustice, exchanges of polarizing verbal attacks, and now another horrific act of mass murder, all against a backdrop of continuing escalation of nuclear threats and posturing. Our physical, psychological, political and social ways of being have been destabilized. Taken in aggregate these events appear to be revealing a time of crisis unprecedented in recent history. Yet they need not overwhelm. Out of dark and trying times, history tells us that transformation can occur.

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Posted in: Current Affairs, Pacifica News, depth psychology, Pacifica Graduate Institute

We Must Respond

Posted by Nikole Hollenitsch on Oct 4, 2017 10:33:47 PM

A guest post by Chancellor and Founding President of Pacifica Graduate Institute, Stephen Aizenstat, Ph.D.

Today we grieve. Our hearts open and we send support and love to those family members and friends who lost loved ones in the shooting in Las Vegas, and, too, to those in places of natural as well as human made strife. Yes. It is a time of mourning.

The turmoil in the world’s soul is visceral. We are experiencing the collective trauma 24/7. No longer can we encounter our angst like a bad dream frightening us in the night, only to disappear in the morning when our eyes open to the avalanche of texts, Instagram posts, tweets, and emails alive on our phone, seducing our attention even before we get out of bed. No. The nightmare is real, here to stay, a living actuality . . . and demanding our response. Yes. We find ourselves in a time of great peril, as the world, as we know it, faces the imminent threats of ecological devastation, the sixth extinction, and technological takeover, which Elon Musk names as “the most serious threat to the survival of the human race.”

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Posted in: The Psyche, Current Affairs, Trauma, collective trauma