Pacifica Graduate Institute

Psyche-Centered Research

“SOUL IS IN WORDS AND IMAGES”

Dr. Elizabeth Nelson is committed to scholarship infused with soul: guided by and centered on the autonomous psyche. She has designed research curricula for three doctoral programs at Pacifica Graduate Institute and currently teaches: 

  • Foundations of depth psychological research & writing

  • Qualitative and mixed methods research

  • Research strategies

  • Dissertation development I – V

  • “All but dissertation” (ABD) seminars 

Psyche-centered research is uniquely challenging because students learn to walk in two worlds. The first is the world of the academy, a microcosm of the educated public that values conscious knowledge and reflects the spirit of the time. The second, alternate world is rooted in the spirit of the depths, and draws upon ancestral, indigenous, imaginal, and transpersonal ways of knowing.

Depth psychologists who gracefully navigate these worlds value the prudence and rigor of traditional scholarship, welcome the gifts of imagination, and produce work that carries personal and cultural meaning.

Psyche, SOMA, CYBORG

“WE NOW LIVE, WORK, LOVE AND PLAY IN THE DIGITAL WORLD”

Dr. Nelson draws on her decades of experience in IT to teach a course that explores the impact of digital life on self and soul. It begins by examining a particular fantasy of the monstrous Other in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein: The enhanced human or cyborg, creature who is manufactured, not born, the offspring of humanity’s enduring love affair with science and technology.

In an age that has decisively dissolved the human-machine interface, few people in the first world can live without their technology, be it smart phone, laptop, Facebook page, or Twitter feed. How does Mary Shelley’s fictional creature foreshadow our 21st-century creatures—the internet, mobile digital devices, and social media—to exceed the control of their creators? Ultimately, the course is a meditation on the benefits, and the costs, of contemporary digital life.

Archetypal Psychology

“ONLY WHEN THINGS FALL APART DO THEY OPEN UP INTO NEW MEANINGS”

Archetypal psychology, firmly rooted in Jung’s thinking and practice, imagines the psyche as theater of multiple persons or figures who dynamically participate in individual and cultural life. They are the psychopomps of the soul who claim us, guide us, and teach us, revealing themselves in myth, metaphor, and language.

The central text for the course is James Hillman’s Re-visioning Psychology, which calls for a comprehensive revolution on behalf of soul. The four moves he describes—personifying, pathologizing, psychologizing, and de-humanizing—train an “archetypal eye” attuned the subtlety, complexity, and continuous creativity of the psyche in all domains of life: human and more-than-human, individual, cultural, political, and ecological. Welcoming the imaginal figures who claim us is poesis in the original Greek sense: a making of self and soul.