Integrating applied mindfulness, analytic therapy, and diversity consciousness.
The Spiritual and Depth Psychology Specialization explores the intersections between mindfulness-based therapy, Jungian-based analytic psychology, and socio-cultural diversity consciousness. Students are supported in developing integrative psychotherapy techniques rooted in both traditional and evidence based practices of the East and West honoring body-mind-spirit wellness.
This degree is offered by AU Los Angeles.
Program Overview
Founded in 2010, the Spiritual and Depth Psychology (SDP) Specialization provides you with a forum to investigate, study, and practice tools for personal growth, discovering your own voice and gifts as a therapist, as well as furthering your appreciation of social and cultural identities. Spiritual and depth psychological therapeutic techniques are able to compassionately reach unconscious levels of family, community, and cultural trauma, helping to restore mental wellness that can be both meaningful and sustaining.
Courses are taught by instructors who are active contributors in the field of Spiritual and Depth Psychology, committed to advancing effective, inter-culturally informed psychotherapeutic practices. The faculty embrace proactive engagement in dialogue on diversity, which specifically includes the affirmation of women, people of color, LGBTQ communities, socio-economically vulnerable, and others often underrepresented in the mental health field and in the training of psychotherapists.
The Spiritual and Depth Psychology Specialization supports our students’ professional development through:
- Core courses (in Applied Mindfulness and Intercultural Depth Psychological techniques), field work, and course-related research that support you in developing your own voice and unique strengths as a training integrative psychotherapist.
- Learning in skills and theoretical knowledge that enhance clinical training and often allow for distinctive abilities such strategic uses of mindfulness applied to anxiety and stress reduction, advanced abilities to meaningfully engage underlying emotional content, deep historical material, helpful in trauma and addiction recovery.
- Augmenting core skills through our elective courses such as: Equine Assisted Therapy, Jungian Dream work, and Mindfulness-based Relapse Prevention. SDP also supports our internationally classes in mindfulness studies in Kyoto, Japan, and Toulouse, France.
- Building connections with the larger SDP community of current students, alumni, and professionals through regular community dinners and networking as well as professional speaking events by leaders in the field.
Degree Requirements
Specialization Courses (17 units)
- Intercultural Transpersonal and Depth Psychology
- Frontiers in Integrative Depth Psychology
- Life as Practice: Inner Work/Social Resp/Comm Srvc
- Mindfulness in Clinical Practice
- Transference/Countertransference & Psyche
- SDP Electives (3 quarter units)
For detailed curriculum and degree requirements, please visit the AULA catalog.
Admissions / Cost / Aid
” Meridian University offers programs unique in their ability to bring cognitive and experiential learning together. “
Academic Structure
Meridian’s academic structure gives students the flexibility to navigate the University’s curricular architecture in ways that match their passions, professional goals, and other life commitments.
The structure is designed to serve a diverse student body, who live around the globe, have varied cultural and clinical visions for their careers, and are at different stages in their professional journey.
Students enroll in a degree program, can elect a concentration, and register for one or multiple courses each quarter. In addition to core courses for the specific degree program and anchor courses that represent the Transformative Learning intent of Meridian’s curriculum, students select elective courses that align with their Meridian concentration, background, and career path. The Academic Structure page includes important details regarding Meridian’s program formats and completion paths.
Students in the Jungian Psychology and Archetypal Studies Specialization
- Critically explore a range of topics central to our understanding of the role of the unconscious psyche in human experience, such as healing, myth, dream, art, soul, spirit, ecology, religion, creativity, personal transformation, individuation, the development of consciousness, and more.
- Deepen the capacity for imaginal, symbolic, mythic, critical, theoretical, and archetypal thinking and being in the world, in order to better confront our present collective challenges.
- Engage with the creative, dynamic unconscious in both its personal and collective dimensions.
- Hone the expression of their unique voice and vision through courses in research, writing, publication, and presentation.
- Study side by side with Jungian scholars and practitioners interested in envisioning new possibilities for depth psychological understanding and transformative practice, both individually and culturally.
- Read deeply and broadly from The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Jung’s The Red Book, and other core texts in the depth psychological tradition.
- Evaluate the limitations and potentials of Jungian and archetypal psychology within contemporary contexts.
Keiron Le Grice discusses the specialization in Jungian Psychology and Archetypal Studies
Contact the Admissions Advisor
- [email protected]
- (805) 879-7305
- Request a call
The Jungian and Archetypal Studies specialization moves depth psychology from the clinical consulting room out into the wider world.
People who are enrolled in our academic programs with an online component will tell you that community and intimacy build quickly in this environment. While you may not “see” your classmates every month, you will “hear” from them weekly. In fact, online learning is particularly conducive to hearing the voices of all students, as it requires participation from everyone; students who normally may be very quiet in a traditional classroom may be more comfortable “speaking” online. In this hybrid program, more than half of the direct instruction for each course is meeting face-to-face with your classmates. Over those four days per quarter on campus, you will continue online discussions over shared meals, watch films and have social time, attend classes and guest lectures, and work together in pairs and groups. Community has been at the heart and soul of this specialization from its inception. In 1948, when Jung gave his dedication speech on the occasion of the founding of the C.G. Jung Institute in Zürich, he called for a community of scholars to come together to imagine extensions for depth psychology in the world. This specialization aims to be such a community, one where students and faculty come together to support each other in exploring, applying, and advancing Jungian and archetypal studies “without limit” in the world. As part of every course, students will share their understanding of how the material is relevant to their lives and their vocational callings, with their classmates and instructors serving as sounding boards and tuning forks who will provide support, share resources, and help refine each other’s theories and practices.
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“By stimulating and supporting the rigorous scholarship and creative research of our students, we hope to further the crucial task of advancing depth psychological ideas and practices as catalysts for individual and cultural transformation.”
The Jungian and Archetypal Studies Specialization (DJA) is for students interested in exploring what Jung called archetypes: universal principles and organizing patterns that pre-condition and animate human experience from the depths of the collective unconscious, a dimension of the psyche common to each of us. The program curriculum enables students to develop a comprehensive understanding of the process of psychological transformation C. G. Jung called “individuation,” which leads to the realization of a greater personality or what he termed “the Self.” This process was the focus of Jung’s study of religious and alchemical symbolism. Inspired by Jung’s understandings, James Hillman went on to develop archetypal psychology, which emphasizes the way mythic figures provide root metaphors for understanding the psyche. By engaging life with a mythopoetic vision, we can perceive the gods and goddesses as present to all things and take up the work Hillman called “soul-making.” This rigorous, creative exploration of Jungian and archetypal psychology provides students with a range of theories, skills, and practices they can apply directly to their professional, personal, and creative lives, while addressing the collective challenges and opportunities at this moment in history. For those called to explore the personal and collective psyche, this program of study provides a unique opportunity to engage with, apply, and advance depth psychological theories and practices within the Jungian and archetypal traditions. Building on the work of C.G. Jung and James Hillman, students consider approaches to the psyche that foster healing, transformation, self-expression, creativity, and the development of consciousness.People who are enrolled in our academic programs with an online component will tell you that community and intimacy build quickly in this environment. While you may not “see” your classmates every month, you will “hear” from them weekly. In fact, online learning is particularly conducive to hearing the voices of all students, as it requires participation from everyone; students who normally may be very quiet in a traditional classroom may be more comfortable “speaking” online. In this hybrid program, more than half of the direct instruction for each course is meeting face-to-face with your classmates. Over those four days per quarter on campus, you will continue online discussions over shared meals, watch films and have social time, attend classes and guest lectures, and work together in pairs and groups. Community has been at the heart and soul of this specialization from its inception. In 1948, when Jung gave his dedication speech on the occasion of the founding of the C.G. Jung Institute in Zürich, he called for a community of scholars to come together to imagine extensions for depth psychology in the world. This specialization aims to be such a community, one where students and faculty come together to support each other in exploring, applying, and advancing Jungian and archetypal studies “without limit” in the world. As part of every course, students will share their understanding of how the material is relevant to their lives and their vocational callings, with their classmates and instructors serving as sounding boards and tuning forks who will provide support, share resources, and help refine each other’s theories and practices.
THE JUNGIAN PERSPECTIVE ON THE PSYCHE
If you desire to deepen your understanding of the dynamics of the psyche, add a depth dimension to your clinical work, or explore psycho-dynamics as a catalyst for personal and professional growth, our specialization in Jungian Studies is for you. With an MA, PhD, or certificate program focusing on Jungian psychology, you can augment your clinical practice or expand your knowledge of C.G. Jung, one of the seminal leaders in psychological theory and history.
The Jungian Studies program is designed for those who wish to have a deeper understanding of analytical psychology and its applications in the world. Our students include physicians, psychologists, social workers, counselors, organizational consultants, engineers, artists, writers, teachers, entrepreneurs, and those in other professions.
Each year, students attend a series of seven weekend seminars at The Jung Center in Houston, Texas. This is an excellent program for those who already have licensure who wish to enhance their clinical repertoire. For degrees leading to licensure, please see our programs in Clinical Psychology.
Depth psychology is a field of psychoanalysis, pioneered by Carl Jung, that looks at a person’s unconscious and semi-conscious mind as well as his or her conscious mind. It’s been around since the early 1900s, and it has mostly been updated by the more modern psychological theories of cognitive and behavioral psychology.
Its Influence on Modern Psychology
In depth psychotherapy, patients are analyzed regarding their repressed experiences and spirituality, and one of the main tenets of this branch of psychoanalysis is that all people are spiritual, whether they want to be or not. As a result of this inborn spirituality, people instinctively create myths to explain their experiences, which are contained in the same deep level of the unconscious mind as the source of their spiritual emotions. There are new schools of this line of teaching, such as the Neo-Freudianism of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott, but for the most part, it doesn’t receive a lot of attention in today’s world of modern medical psychological therapy. However, as an academic study, it has spurred many influential papers in the field of psychological research, and it retains a lot of value as a work of early psychological literature.
Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud were responsible for popularizing this method of interpreting a person’s motives based on fears, emotions and memories hidden in his or her unconscious mind, and they had help from contemporary researchers Pierre Janet, William James and Alfred Adler. There are three main lines of thinking within the broader field of depth psychology, and each school of thought is associated with a different psychologist. The modern view, called object relations theory, is led by researchers Klein and Winnicott and has its roots in Freud’s psychoanalysis of the early 20th century. The second approach is based on Adler’s research into individual psychology, and the last and most famous perspective is based on Jung’s analytical style of psychology.
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Carl Jung’s Thoughts on the Unconscious Mind
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Jung believed that there are essentially three parts of the mind: the unconscious, semi-conscious and conscious mind. He wrote that repressed memories are stored in the unconscious mind, while personality characteristics are stored in the semi-conscious mind. This half-aware part of the mind is responsible for all aspects of our behavior, from the way we act within social groups to the way we present ourselves to strangers, although its value in modern times is mainly academic.
Jung wrote extensively on this area of psychoanalysis, and his theories were extremely influential throughout the 20th century. They came about at a time when psychology was a new branch of science, and researchers at the time didn’t have an established methodology. The scientists who came after Jung improved on his ideas quite a bit, and the new schools of thought based on the work of Jung and Freud have themselves been very influential. However, there are critics of Jung’s work, such as the Esoteric psychologists, who believe that behavior can’t be adequately explained by repressed experiences in the unconscious mind.
Psychology is one of the newest and most important branches of science, and studying the way the unconscious mind affects a person’s behavior is one of the main objectives of psychoanalysis. If you have a natural understanding of the way people process experiences and emotions, you may be interested in learning more about depth psychology.
