The Vocation of the Depth Psychotherapist
Streaming coming soon
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A two-part lecture on depth psychotherapy as a modern vocation and the three archetypal figures behind it: physician-healer, philosopher-scientist and priest-hierophant.
Edward F. Edinger
Edward F. Edinger (1922–1998) was an American psychiatrist and Jungian analyst, widely regarded as one of the most important interpreters of Jung. Trained in medicine at Yale, he worked in analysis with Esther Harding and was a founding member and later president of the C.G. Jung Foundation in New York. In 1979 he moved to Los Angeles, where he was a senior analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute and gave the lecture series recorded here. His books include Ego and Archetype (1972), The Creation of Consciousness (1984), Anatomy of the Psyche (1985) and many volumes drawn from his lectures.
Parts
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Part 1: The Vocation of the Depth Psychotherapist, Part 1
0:40:57
Edinger speaks of the vocation he and his audience share and his gratitude for finding work that truly fits. Depth psychotherapy is a unique 20th-century vocation arising from the discovery of the reality of the psyche, as nuclear physics arose from subatomic reality: Freud's unconscious and Curie's radioactivity both came at the turn of the century. It is both science (theory) and art (one-to-one practice).
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Part 2: The Vocation of the Depth Psychotherapist, Part 2
0:41:49
Continues with the three historical traditions behind the therapist. The priest's sacrifice, the patient's gratitude, is offered on, not kept by, the therapist; the hierophant of the Eleusinian mysteries gives revelation. These appear as phases of therapy: physician (treatment, applied knowledge), philosopher (Socratic dialogue, mutually seeking the truth), and priest (revelation of the numinosum), whose distinctions blur in practice.