Seeding Liberation: a Dialogue Between Depth Psychology and Liberation Psychology." in D
1 "Seeding liberation: A dialogue between depth psychology and liberation psychology." In D. Slattery & L. Corbett (Eds.), Depth Psychology: Meditations in the Field. Einsiedeln, SW, 2002. Seeding Liberation: A Dialogue Between Depth Psychology and Liberation Psychology Mary Watkins Depth psychology and the liberation of being Over the past thirty years since my initial love affair with depth psychology--particularly Jungian and archetypal psychology--I have periodically wondered about what it was that so seduced and intrigued me. Was it its acceptance and valuing of inbreaks of the imaginal, of depression, of pathologized images and experiences, all of which frightened me as a young woman? Was it the impassioned deconstructing of cultural and psychological ideas beneath this acceptance that appealed to my fierce desire to see beneath the taken-for-granted? More recently I have thought that this long marriage between myself and depth psychology has been possible because I found in depth psychology a basic orientation to being that seeks to allow what is to be present in its animation and its difference. It is a desire for the liberation of being.1 In depth psychology our habitual point of view, the "ego," is held suspect, and seen as partial and prejudiced. The various methods of depth psychology-- Freud's free association, Jung's active imagination, Reich's body work, Winnicott's play, dream work, working the transference--attempt to have us 1This paper is half of a longer presentation given at a Pacifica Graduate Institute conference, Mythologies of Soul, Spring 1997. The other half, previously published, traces the effort toward liberation in the methods of Freud, Jung, Reich, Winnicott, and existential- phenomenology (see Watkins, 2000).
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