Depth Psychology: Empowering Multicultural Women in the Wider World-An Interview with Self-Made Media Mogul, Nely Galán, MFT.  A Guest Post by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

Listen to the full audio interview with Nely Galán here (approx. 32 mins)

We’ve all heard the adage that success doesn’t always bring happiness, a concept Nely Galán knows well. As a Latina and a self-made media mogul who has produced hundreds of television shows, headed a TV network, and generated a significant amount of income, she felt an odd sense of relief when the economy crashed in 2008, bringing many of her projects to a halt. She realized the extent to which she felt like a hamster running around a wheel, and while she would never have tried to exit the industry if she had maintained her level of involvement in multiple projects, the economic downturn provided her a way out.

 

By that point in her life, she had been through psychotherapy and understood, from a personal perspective, how powerful it could be. Acknowledging that she had always wanted to go to school to study psychology, she took the plunge; first finishing a B.A., before applying to Pacifica, which had already been in her “mind and heart for a while,” as she reveals.

 

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A guest post by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

Aaron Mason, M.A., is a freelance medical writer with an infectious laugh, whose love of depth psychology led him to make sweeping changes in his life since deciding to earn his Master’s degree in the Engaged Humanities Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. On his desk in his West Hollywood apartment sits a Pez dispenser gifted to him by a close friend. The figure is a coyote, and Aaron has constructed a wig for it using multi-colored ribbons, and grounded its feet in magenta clay. He attached the coyote to his dashboard when he drove across the country from Jersey City in a dramatic move to the west coast. Aaron has dubbed this icon “Coyote Drag Queen,” a name that takes on layers of meaning when one has a chance to hear Aaron’s personal story.

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In 2011, Sabina Spielrein became something of a household name due to the debut of a mainstream film called A Dangerous Method, starring well-known actors including Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, and Viggo Mortensen. The film purported to tell the story of Sabina Spielrein, a young woman psychiatric patient and acquaintance of the infamous doctors Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, pioneers of the modern psychoanalytical and depth psychology movements.

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Goddesses live in detective fiction by women in ways little noticed before The Sleuth and the Goddess; in particular, how Hestia, Artemis, Athena and Aphrodite breathe into and shape woman-authored mysteries, whether driving a hardboiled P.I., such as Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski, or haunting domestic oriented sleuth Hannah Swensen, composed by Joanne Fluke. Goddesses are structures of consciousness and being, archetypes divining various forms of art rooted in the soul. Although these archetypes defy gender boundaries (so that male gods creep into women’s writing, just as goddesses are seduced or pursued by, or summon a male author), these four goddesses: Hestia of home and hearth, Artemis of hunting, Athena of communal survival, and Aphrodite of wily desire, most deeply incarnate aspects of the sacred in women’s mysteries. Just as subgenres of women’s writing such as the detective “cozy” have not yet received their due of critical attention, so too the goddesses are demanding that more attention be paid to the feminine psyche. The Sleuth and the Goddess shows us that to read the works by renowned authors such as Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton, Diane Mott Davidson, Jacqueline Winspear, Lindsey Davis, and many more, is to summon the goddesses and be blessed by their vision, beauty, and call to danger.

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