Evolution and Growth in the Integrative Therapy and Healing Program: An Interview with Juliet Rohde-Brown, Ph.D.

Curandera and storyteller, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, speaks of depth psychology as a way to “the river beneath the river,” to a place that delves deeper than the surface of things into implicit and nonlinear knowing and broadens the subtle field of intersubjectivity, integrating systems of being. Integratio may be fostered by a restoration of “beginner’s mind” to renew a sense of wonder, openness, feeling, and curiosity.

Perhaps you are aware of something that drives you, breathes you, that has brought you here to inquire about our integrative program and to do so now in this intense time of global uncertainty, paradox, and possibility?

What is speaking to you and through you? Why DPT now?

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

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.”

A guest post by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

Psychotherapy is pervasive in contemporary culture. Even if you’re not a therapist yourself, if you’re taking the time to read this post, chances are good that either you or someone close to you has been involved in therapy at some point in their lives. And, while you may feel you have a good understanding of what happens in the therapy room, there may be more than meets the eye. Do you ever wonder, for example, what has to occur in the therapeutic process so that the basic experience is what it needs to be for both the client and the therapist? How does a therapist tap into the unconscious in order to help the client be more of “who they are”? How does synchronicity—and the interactive field that emerges between two individuals—serve up messages from the unconscious for the benefit of the work? More, where does the therapist her/himself turn for help in honing their own intuition and skills that ultimately contribute to their own individuation process in working with clients?

A guest post by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” ― Kahlil Gibran

We are all intimately familiar with suffering. And, while we might wish it away when it is painfully present, it is a normal part of human life, Dr. Lionel Corbett, M.D., Jungian analyst and professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute reminded me when I recently sat down for a depth discussion with him on the topic.

Etymologically, the word “suffering” comes from two Latin roots: sub—meaning “under”—and ferre, meaning “to carry or bear,” as in “to bear a burden.” But suffering is not necessarily pathological, Lionel insists. The root of the word “suffer” is also the root of the English word “fertile,” so it is also related to the idea of bearing fruit. Psychologically, then, suffering can produce something; it’s not random or meaningless, nor merely something to get rid of. In reality, it can act as either a fertilizer or a poison. It can be harmful or it can be helpful, but we need a framework by which we can understand it.

A video post with Lionel Corbett, M.D.

"Psychotherapists who are interested in Depth Psychology are living in a professional world that is dominated by cognitive behavioral approaches....Human relationships are much too complicated to be fully contained in the net of empirical research. Measurement is certainly not an appropriate approach to the unconscious. The unconscious is much too slippery for quantitative methods and it's certainly no use in the spiritual dimension which is the dimension that jungian psychology is concerned with. It's important to remember that all theories of psychotherapy are based on a certain view of human nature and a certain