Psychotherapy.net has added three new videos by Virginia Satir to our online streaming collection: Blended Family with a Troubled Boy, A Family at the Point of Growth, and A Step Along the Way: A Family with a Drug Problem. The Pacifica Library's Exclusive Collection now contains 136 titles (220 hours), including several by prominent psychologists such as James Hillman, Irvin Yalom, Carl Rogers, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Albert Bandura, Peter Levine, Virginia Satir, Ernest Rossi, and more. The Psychotherapy.net database allows you to view videos online, with each video broken down by chapter for quick navigation. Synchronized transcripts and subtitles are available for many of the videos, with the spoken words highlighted on a transcript as a video plays. Many videos also come with instructor's manuals. We welcome you to explore the collections and contact the Pacifica Graduate Research Library with any questions. 

Pacifica is excited to announce that is has several faculty, students, and alumni presenting at the international conference The Art and Psyche in Sicily. The conference is organized by Art and Psyche Working Group and is being held in the Grand Hotel, Minareto, Siracusa, in Italy from Tuesday, September 2 to September 6, 2015.

The full title for the conference is:

We invite you to learn more about the Pacifica community members presenting at the conference.

Barre, Robin. Student at Pacifica Graduate Institute in the M.A. Counseling Psychology Program. Robin presents Crocodile Mandala on Saturday, September 5th at the conference.

A guest post by Jody Gentian Bower, Ph.D. The initial quote is from her book Jane Eyre’s Sisters: How Women Live and Write the Heroine Story.

"The Aletis represents a feminine archetype every bit as important as the masculine archetype of the hero. This is why people keep writing her story, trying to put down in words something felt and understood unconsciously, something important about women."

Ever since Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949, the story of the Hero’s Quest has informed the thinking and writing of countless authors, scriptwriters, folklorists, mythologists, and depth psychologists. Campbell’s work forms one of the pillars of education at Pacifica Graduate Institute and continues to be amplified by and inspire the work of many Pacifica students and faculty.

The Hero is almost always male, however, and so there has been a concurrent effort to either re-vision the Quest story from a female perspective, or to find another story that fits a woman’s journey to individuation better. Works such as The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock and The Bridge to Wholeness by Jean Benedict Raffa fall into the former category, while Christine Downing, Jean Shinoda Bolen, and Clarissa Pinkola Estés are examples of authors who have sought wisdom in myths and folktales featuring goddesses, princesses, and witches.

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.

One of the papers that 2nd year M.A. Counseling Psychology students present to their peers and professor Allen Koehn is on healing. The assignment asks them to reflect on their first two years in the program and write about the personal transformation that has taken place. Because the program is psycho-active and students participate in personal therapy, they find themselves going through a process of healing as they acquire the tools and skills necessary to be a therapist. This process of healing and the return to wholeness is the topic for the next complimentary salon and lecture on Friday, June 26 with Allen Koehn, D. Min. 

From June 25-28, 2015 on the campus of the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Pacifica faculty member Mary Watkins and students Jaime Arteaga, Peter Benedict, Karen Palamos,Lizzie Rodriguez, Peter Benedict, Jennifer Edson, and Laurie Kindel will engage and present to fellow attendees of the SCRA's 15th Biennial Conference. The Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA) is a division of the American Psychological Association, serving many different disciplines that focus on community research and action.

Community Reparations

A guest post by Liz Diligio, a 2nd year student in the Community Psychology, Liberation Psychology, and Ecopsychology Specialization of the M.A./Ph.D. Depth Psychology Program (C.L.E. program)

In May of 1972 Jon Burge, a Vietnam veteran, was promoted to police detective on Chicago’s south side. For the next twenty years Burge and other officers used torture techniques Burge learned in Vietnam to force confessions from men arrested in the neighborhood. Jon Burge eventually sent over 200 hundred men to prison based on confessions obtained through torture. The practice finally came to light during proceedings before the Police Board in 1992, when City lawyers admitted that the evidence of Area 2 (Burge’s district) use of torture established "an astounding pattern or plan… to torture certain suspects… into confessing to crimes.”

Pacifica Graduate Institute professors held an Eco-Grief Gathering and Ceremony in response to the Refugio Oil Spill. Also featured in this post is drone video footage of the oil spill, captured two days after the ruptured pipe line began spewing oil into the Pacific Ocean.

May 28, 2015 –Santa Barbara, CA.

Linda Buzzell, M.A., LMFT, and Maren Hansen, M. Div., Ph.D., from Pacifica Graduate Institute hosted an Eco-Grief Gathering and Ceremony yesterday, in response to a recent oil spill at Refugio Beach. 

A guest post by Elizabeth Éowyn Nelson. The following is excerpted from her book Psyche's Knife: Archetypal Explorations of Love and Power.

1

LOST KNIFE

Simple things are always the most difficult.

—C. G. Jung, Alchemical Studies

At dusk, the silence of the lonely rooms grows thick. A young woman walks down the broad stone corridor, caressing the smooth glass of the oil lamp in her hands. The viscous liquid sloshes lazily from side to side as she enters their room. She knows he won’t arrive for many hours yet, not until it is dark. It has always been this way. With trembling hands, she sets the lamp behind the luxurious bed and gently touches the cold black wick. Then she turns her attention to the knife.