This is the power point presentation given during class one of Theoretical Foundations of Psychotherapy, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Thomas Elsner instructor, Fall 2010.

1. Theoretical Foundations of
Depth Psychotherapy
Class One
Counseling Psychology Program
Pacifica Graduate Institute
Fall, 2010
Thomas Elsner

2. Some Basis Questions in the
Practice of Psychotherapy
• What is the problem?
• What is the goal?
• How do we accomplish that goal?

3. What is Your Experience So
Far?
• What has been healing for you?
• What has been problematic for you?
• Why are you REALLY interested in becoming
a psychotherapist?
• How do you deal in your own life with the
problems you will ask your clients to deal
with?
• “The patient’s treatment begins with the
doctor, so to speak.” (Jung)

4. THEORY
• THEORY 1592, "conception, mental
scheme," from Gk. theoria
"contemplation, speculation, a looking
at, things looked at."

5. Theories are Just Theories
• “Theories in psychology are the very
devil. . . . [T]hey should always be
regarded as mere auxiliary concepts
that can be laid aside at any time.”
(C.G. Jung)

6. Which Theory is True?
• Depth Psychology
– Freud, Jung, Object Relations, Self Psychology,
Psychoanalytic, Moore, Woodman
• Cognitive-Behavioral
• Humanistic
– Rogers, Gestalt, Existential
• Feminist
• Post-Modern
– Narrative, Brief Therapy, Solution Focused

7. What is the Purpose and
Value of Theory?
• Who does it help?
• What is its value? Its drawbacks?
• Flashlight analogy.
• We tend to see what we know.

8. Parzival
• “What ails thee?”
• A question may or may not have an
answer; but its asking opens up the
possibility of something new, unknown,
unthought-of, coming in.

9. The Mythology of
Psychotherapy: Archetypal
Images of Healing
• What are the basic principles and
practices of healing that have been
believed in by our species since the
beginning and are still with us today?

10. “Therapy”
• “The word ‘Therapy’ for instance comes from
the Greek verb Therapeuein which means to
tend or render service to the gods in their
temples. So, in the temples of antiquity,
therapeuein referred to the careful attendance
to cultic worship and religious ceremonies.
(Edinger, The Vocation of Depth Psychotherapy,
p. 10)

11. Basic Characteristics of
Indigenous Healing
• 1) The Healer is endowed with great prestige
• 2) Patient puts his trust in the person of the healer.
• 3) The Healer himself or herself undergoes an
initiatory illness
• 4) Healing is a public and a collective procedure,
often ceremonial. (Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious,
p. 38)

12. Loss of Soul: Something Has
Got Out
• “Sometimes [the soul] wanders into the world
of the dead or of the spirits. The latter
concept is found predominantly in Siberia,
where a cure can be performed only by a
shaman, that is, a man, who, during his long
initiation, has been introduced into the world
of the spirits and is thus able to function as a
mediator between that world and the world of
the living.” (Ellenberger, Discovery of the
Unconscious, p. 7)
• CURE = Soul retrieval

13. Possession: Something Has
Got In
• “An individual suddenly seems to lose his
identity to become another person.”
(Ellenberger, p. 13)
• Cure = Exorcism
– Healing possession and obsession states through
exteriorization of them.

14. Violation of a Taboo: Guilt and
Shame
• “The pathogenic secret.” (Ellenberger,
p. 45)
• CURE = Confession and Acceptance

15. Other Important Indigenous
Methods of Healing
• Healing through gratification of
frustrations.
• Healing through “incubation”
• Healing through ceremonial
reenactment of the initial trauma.
• Healing through the retelling and
reenactment of creation myths.

16. How Does Depth
Psychotherapy Work?
• “We don’t know how it works.” (Edinger,
The Vocation of Depth Psychotherapy,
p. 21)

17. How Does Someone Become
a Depth Psychotherapist?
• “In my experience every person who has
devoted effort over a long period of time in his
analysis to the conscious recognition of his
own problems has become attractive to the
people around him. . . That ‘something’ that
creates in a person a healing emanation.”
(Von Franz, Profession and Vocation, p. 267)

18. Profession and Vocation
• Vocation = a call from the gods or spirits to
become a healer.
– This call takes the form of a Shamanic Illness:
From the standpoint of modern depth psychology,
this shamanic experience amounts to undergoing
an invasion of the unconscious and adequately
integrating it.

19. What is the Central Myth of
Healing?
• The myth of a healer with an incurable
wound. Chiron and Asclepius.
• “The wounded doctor heals best.” (Seneca)
• “To be at home in the darkness of suffering
and there to find germs of light and recovery
with which, as though by enchantment, to
bring forth Asclepius, the sunlike healer.”
(Kerenyi)

20. The Wounded Healer
• “However, there are genuine ‘wounded
healers’ among analysts . . . Such an analyst
recognizes how the patient’s difficulties
constellate his own problems, and vice versa,
and he therefore works openly not only on the
patient, but on himself. He remains forever a
patient as well as a healer.” (Guggenbuhl-
Craig, Power in the Helping Professions, p. 108)

21. The Wounded Healer . . .
• “The wounded healer IS the archetype of the
self . . . And is at the bottom of all genuine
healing procedures.” (Von Franz)

22. . . . And the Healing
Wound
• “We do not cure our neuroses, our
neuroses cure us.” (Jung)

23. What is Your Theory of
Psychotherapy?
• How does it work?
• What heals?

24. Is There a “Pacifica” Theory of
Psychotherapy? Two Main
Ideas You Will Encounter
• The Relationship: Empathy
• Not Knowing: “Negative Capability”: “When
man is capable of being in uncertainties,
Mysteries, doubts without any irritable
reaching after fact & reason.”(John Keats,
Letter to George and Thomas Keats, 28 Dec.
1817)

25. Edinger, “The Vocation of
Depth Psychotherapy”
• Physician-Healer:
– Goal: Cure.
• Method: Treatment
• Philosopher-Scientist:
– Goal: Knowledge.
• Method: Dialogue
• Priest-Heirophant:
– Goal: Redemption.
• Method: Revelation

26. Shadows of the
Psychotherapist
“The Negative Collective Mythology of the
Psychotherapist”

27. What is the Shadow of the
Psychotherapist?
• The power complex. “One might be tempted
to take over the role of the parent or of the
wise man, the one who knows what is right.”
(Von Franz, Profession and Vocation, p. 278)
• This is a type of harm caused directly by our
desire to help.

28. Guggenbuhl-Craig, “Power in
the Helping Professions”
• As soon as we know ‘what’s best’ for our
patient or student we have, in Guggenbuhl-
Craig’s language, a ‘splitting of the
archetype.’ One of us is all knowing and all-
powerful, and the other is ignorant, neurotic
and powerless. (Power in the Helping
Professions, p. 7)

29. The Shadow of the Doctor,
Philosopher, and Priest?
• The doctor . . . The one who has the power to
heal . . . This lofty conception of the doctor.
Shadow = Charlatan
• Philosopher . . . The one who can solve all
problems . . . Shadow = The heartless
thinker.
• The priest . . . Expected to sincerely try to act
on God’s behalf and in accordance with his
will . . . Shadow = False Prophet.

30. The Initial Contact Between
Client and Therapist
• “The patient wishes to be freed from his
suffering, from neurotic symptoms . . . hopes
to find a redeemer . . . also for access to
secret knowledge that will find a solution to all
of life’s problems.” (Power in the Helping
Professions, pg. 42)

31. The Splitting of the Archetype
of the Wounded Healer
• “In the doctor, the repression of one pole of
the archetype (Wounded Healer) leads to the
reverse situation. He begins to have the
impression that weakness, illness, and
wounds have nothing to do with him . . . He
becomes only a doctor and his patients are
only patients.” (p. 82)

32. Overcoming the Split
• “Overcoming the split requires the therapist to
be affected by the patient, to observe how his
own unresolved issues are stirred up by the
patient’s problems. In this way, the Old
Woman is allowed into the room, and the
therapist is ‘in the soup’ with the patient.”
(Power in the Helping Professions, p. 11)

33. Reflections on Becoming a
Therapist
• Why have I now decided to study
psychotherapy at Pacifica?

34. Marion Woodman, Addiction
to Perfection
“the extreme form to which the unrealized feminine assuming masculine ideals foreign to
its own nature can lead is perhaps epitomized in Shakespeare’s Macbeth”
• “The extreme form to which the unrealized feminine assuming
masculine ideals foreign to its own nature can lead is perhaps
epitomized in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.” (p. 18)
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35. The Woman with the
Skeletons (Lady Macbeth).
1906, Gustav-Adolf Mossa
• “The woman robbed of her femininity through her pursuit of
masculine goals that are in themselves a parody of what
masculinity really is.” (Woodman, p. 7)
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36. A Theory of Addiction: Why
are People Addicted?
• “ . . . Our patriarchal culture emphasizes specialization and
perfection.” (Woodman, p. 10)
• “Many people in our society are being driven to addictions because
there is no collective container for their natural spiritual needs. Their
natural propensity for transcendent experience, for ritual, for
connection to some energy greater than their own, is being distorted
into addictive behavior.” (p. 29)
– The Magnet
– The Curse

37. Athena
• “If we look at modern Athenas sprung from their father’s
foreheads we do not necessarily see liberated women.”
(Woodman, p. 9)
• “Behind the masks of these successful lives, there lurks
disillusionment and terror.” (Woodman, p. 12)
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38. Medusa
• “ . . . She is making her presence increasingly
felt in her unquenchable cravings for
something.” (Woodman, p. 9)
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39. The Split Between the
Persona and the Inner Being
• “One reason people are suffering today to
an almost intolerable degree is that their
unmediated suffering has no conscious
connection with its archetypal ground.
(SOUL) Cut off from that ground they feel
they are alone, and their suffering becomes
meaningless.” (p. 134)

40. Thomas Moore, Care of the
Soul
• “The great malady of the twentieth century, implicated in all of
our troubles and affecting us individually and socially is ‘loss of
soul.’ When soul is neglected, it doesn’t just go away; it appears
symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, and loss of
meaning.” (p. xi)
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41. The Frog Prince
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“What the unconscious wants . . . will assert itself
either as a change of life style or as a neurosis or
even a psychosis.” (Jung)

42. Loss of Soul
• “ . . .a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
(Shakespeare, Macbeth)

43. Healing the Soul
• I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly,
that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep
emotional self
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only
time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long, difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and
the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify. (D.H.
Lawrence, “Healing”)

44. Care vs. Cure
• “The role of the curate was to provide a
religious context . . .” (p. xv)
• “Its goal is not to make life problem-
free, but to give ordinary life depth and
value.” (p. 4)

45. Care of the Soul and the
Feeling Function
• Jung’s Theory of Typology
– Thinking/Feeling
– Sensation/Intuition
– Extraversion/Introversion
• The Theory of Compensation

46. The Symbolic Life
• The Dramatic Truth of Delusion
– Crocodiles in the Sewers
– “The Three Languages”
• The messages that lie within the illness
– Anxiety example
– Eating Disorder example (p. 9)
• The dream (p. 11) “The dream generated deeply felt
thoughts and memories, all related to the food problems.”

47. The Logic and Language of
the Soul
• “Faced with depression, we might ask
ourselves, ‘What is it doing here? Does it
have some necessary role to play?’” (p. 137) .
. .
• “For the soul depression is an initiation, a rite
of passage.” (p. 146)

48. Care vs. Cure
• “I understand therapy as nothing more than
bringing imagination to areas that are devoid
of it, which then must express themselves by
becoming symptomatic.” (p. xiii)
• “The object of therapeutic treatment is to
return imagination to the things that have
become only physical.” (p. 159)

49. Imagination
• “Imagination is an authentic accomplishment
of thought or reflection that does not spin
aimless and groundless fantasies into the
blue; that is to say, it does not merely play
with its object, rather it tries to grasp the inner
facts and portray them in images true to their
nature. This activity is an opus, a work.” (p.
185 -- quoting Jung)