Depth psychology

Depth psychology is a broad term that refers to any psychological approach examining the depth (the hidden or deeper parts) of human experience. It is applied in psychoanalysis.

Rather than utilizing techniques, it provides a frame of reference for exploring underlying motives and approaching various mental disorders, with the belief that these frames of reference are intrinsically healing. It seeks the deep layer(s) underlying behavioral and cognitive processes — the unconscious.

The initial work and development of the theories and therapies by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler and Otto Rank that came to be known as depth psychology have resulted in three perspectives in modern times:
 * Psychoanalytic: Freud's object relations
 * Adlerian: Adler’s Individual psychology
 * Jungian: Jung’s Analytical psychology and James Hillman’s "Archetypal psychology"

Those schools most strongly influenced by the work of Carl Jung, a 20th-century Swiss psychiatrist who in his Analytical psychology emphasizes questions of psyche, human development and personality development (or individuation).

Jung was strongly influenced by esotericism and draws on myths, archetypes and the idea of the collective unconscious.

Summary of primary elements

 * Depth psychology states that psyche is a process that is partly conscious and partly unconscious. The unconscious in turn contains repressed experiences and other personal-level issues in its "upper" layers and "transpersonal" (e.g. collective, non-I, archetypal) forces in its depths.
 * The psyche spontaneously generates mythico-religious symbolism and is therefore spiritual as well as instinctive in nature. An implication of this is that the choice of whether to be a spiritual person or not does not exist—the only question is exactly where we put our spirituality: do we live it consciously or unknowingly invest it in nonspiritual aspirations (perfectionism, addictions, greed, fame) that eventually possess us by virtue of their ignored but frightfully potent numinous power?
 * All minds, all lives, are ultimately embedded in some sort of myth-making. Mythology is not a series of old explanations for natural events (cosmic, meterological, agrarian); it is rather the richness and wisdom of humanity played out in a wondrous symbolical storytelling.
 * Because we have a psychical share in all that surrounds us, we are sane and whole only to the degree that we care for our environment and tend responsibly to the world in which we live.

Related reading

 * Robert Aziz, C.G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity (1990), currently in its 10th printing, a refereed publication of The State University of New York Press. ISBN 0-7914-0166-9.
 * Robert Aziz, Synchronicity and the Transformation of the Ethical in Jungian Psychology in Carl B. Becker, ed. Asian and Jungian Views of Ethics. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. ISBN 0-313-30452-1.
 * Robert Aziz, The Syndetic Paradigm: The Untrodden Path Beyond Freud and Jung (2007), a refereed publication of The State University of New York Press. ISBN 13:978-0-7914-6982-8.