Stories from recent graduates of Pacifica's M.A. Engaged Humanities and the Creative Life Program 

"Pacifica's M.A. Engaged Humanities and Creative Life Program has transformed my life in the best way, giving me a language to speak my truth, and a frame through which life and everything I do seems more meaningful and connected to everything else. The program trained me to live creatively in every single area of my life. I'm less fearful since I studied at Pacifica. I am more free since I completed the program. I am a wife and a mother, and I make a living as a screenwriter for the Hispanic audiences in the US. And I am a performer. Life is still the same life, but I process it in a richer way. I like and honor being a lot of things at the same time. I don't constrain myself to be only one thing, one role any more. This is all thanks to the Engaged Humanities and Creative Life Master's Program I did at Pacifica Graduate Institute."

Mariangelica Duque Wife, Mother, friend, Screenwriter, Mentor, Performer and more

Horses, Hestia and Guinevere: Mythological Perspectives for Everyday Life: An Interview with Janet Bubar Rich
A Guest Post by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

Janet Bubar Rich became fascinated by horses in myth and legend when she was working on her Ph.D. in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute. She recalls how she used to look at horses across the field from the campus during breaks, and being so taken with the magnificent animals. She began noticing the image of the horse in ancient Greek, Nordic, Hindu, and Buddhist mythologies, as well as in Native American legend, and she considered the symbol of the horse in films such as Seabiscuit, or popular plays like War Horse. Enchanted by the way that horses “enable people to go further and move faster” than they can otherwise go, Bubar Rich ultimately published a book entitled Riding on Horses' Wings: Reimagining Today's Horse for Tomorrow's World.

A guest post by Craig Chalquist, Ph.D.

What good is the study of myth?

I love this topic so much I could write a book on it. In fact, I have, to be called Myths Among Us: When Timeless Tales Return to Life (World Soul Books, 2017). The book spends 658 pages on the question of what good is mythology, with real-life applications and many stories.

Here I’ll offer some brief examples taken from the life arenas of self-knowledge, work, finance, diversity, and persuasion.

An Interview with MFT Consortium Stipend Recipient, Naris Kesheshe
A Guest Post by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

When she was 13 years old, Naris Kesheshe—who recently finished her third year in the Counseling Psychology Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute—was dramatically uprooted from her native culture in Iran and forced to start anew as an immigrant to the United States.

The culture shock she experienced from moving from an all-girls school in her native country to a school in the U.S. where both genders were integrated was just one of several catalysts for her, and the ultimately, the trauma of her entire experience eventually led her to study whole group dynamics, sociology, and the psychology of the person and the whole psyche.

Dreams, Calling, Suffering, and Individuation: Finding Light in the Darkness An Interview with Jungian Analyst and New Pacifica Core Faculty Member, Fanny Brewster. A Guest Post by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

Fanny Brewster first came to Pacifica as a student because she was interested in studying dreams. Once armed with her doctorate and a strong foundation in depth psychology and dreamwork, she identified a desire to go on and become a Jungian analyst, and synchronistically, now finds herself returning to Pacifica to teach as core faculty in the Clinical Psychology program there.

A guest post by Tina Stromsted, Ph.D., Dance/Movement Therapist, Jungian Analyst

“What makes alchemy so valuable for psychotherapy is that its images concretize the experiences of transformation that one undergoes in psychotherapy […] Alchemy provides a kind of anatomy of individuation.” ~ Edward Edinger

How do we evoke the light in the dark body? How do we embody the soul spark, bring it to consciousness, and live it more fully in our daily lives?

A presentation by Susan Rowland, Response at the Radical Edge: Depth Psychology for the 21st Century Summary article by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

Changing society requires changing our ideas about education, specifically about disciplines, began Susan Rowland in her stimulating talk on Dionysus and the power of transdisciplinarity. The Greek god Dionysus, perhaps best known as the god of grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness, fertility, theatre and religious ecstasy, doesn’t attempt to divide things up, but rather mixes them up instead.

Dionysus has a drum, which covered a lot of the artistic practice of the time of the ancient Greeks, Rowland relates. At that time, when Dionysus presided over the Athenian dramas, going to the theater was not a leisure activity, but a major civic action, which involved politics and religion, as well as the arts.

We are excited and honored to announce that Community Psychology, Liberation Psychology, and Ecopsychology Specialization doctoral student Harry Grammer has been named a CNN hero.

Harry is founder and president of New Earth, an Los Angeles based organization "provid[ing] youth with mentor-based creative arts and educational programs including poetry, music production, gardening, and fitness. New Earth currently serves 500 young people per week who are incarcerated in Los Angeles County detention facilities and placement homes and in the Orange County Juvenile Hall.

Upon release from incarceration, young people join our New Earth Arts & Leadership center in Culver City, CA where they receive career training, jobs, a fully accredited High School education program, mentorship, case management, nature expeditions, arts programming and wrap-around services that help them re-enter their communities with all the support and nurturing they need to make a successful transition." [1]

Please enjoy the two videos below, produced by CNN, featuring Harry Grammer.

You can also read more about Harry and his own story of being on probation in his youth, and how he came to found New Earth at pgiaa.org.

Concurrent session with Dr. Steven Aizenstat and Dr. Douglas Thomas, Response at the Radical Edge: Depth Psychology for the 21st Century
Summary article by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

When we move out of identification with images that arise at critical moments in our lives (whether from dreams or other modalities), and into relationship with the image, we get information from the images. In other words, if we can grasp that the image we encounter is “not me,” we can benefit from its underlying wisdom.

When you work with dreams from an animated point of view, notes Stephen Aizenstat, who pioneered the process of DreamTending[1], it brings the dream to life. When one comes into a relationship with the image, it allows the image its own innate intelligence, and it can speak to us what it knows.

Opening Keynote presentation by Donald Kalsched, Ph.D., Response at the Radical Edge: Depth Psychology for the 21st Century
Summary article by Bonnie Bright, Ph.D.

“The false God changes suffering into violence. The true God changes violence into suffering,” begins Jungian analyst Donald Kalsched, quoting Simone Weil, French philosopher, mystic, and political activist [1], at the “Response at the Radical Edge” conference at Pacifica Graduate Institute. That day, Kalsched was up in the dark hours before dawn reworking his talk, which he gave a new title, “Healthy and Unhealthy: Hatred in the Psyche and In the Country.” He noted that the “false god” is abroad in the country at the moment, and while many in the field of Depth Psychology are working hard on behalf of “the true God” who turns violence into suffering, they are finding it difficult in a culture that supports the “false God” in this scenario.

Paul Russell [2], a respected analyst who taught in Boston, defined “trauma” as an injury to our capacity to feel. When our capacity to feel is injured, we cease to be able to imagine, because imagination depends on emotional literacy. In the process, archetypal aspects attempt to do the feeling for us, notes Kalsched, who has deemed this process the “self-care” system, which, in its attempt to sequester and protect can also end up persecuting us and keeping us from experience in order to preserve our innocence. However, we need to experience: the world actually needs suffering, Kalsched insists, citing poet John Keats along with archetypal psychologist James Hillman who loved to quote him, saying, “The world is a veil of soulmaking.”