Editorial

Abstract

As a professor and Research Coordinator at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California in the discipline of depth psychology, if I have any giftat all as a teacher of research, it's for profoundly disturbing the peace of my students. There is one fundamental ontological assertion of depth psychology, I share with them - the assertion that we are partially unconscious human beings in the world. If you follow Freud, you work from the premise of the reality of the personal unconscious; if you follow Jung, you work from the premise of the reality of both the personal and the collective unconscious. Either way, the reality of the unconscious posits terrible trouble for researchers, I say. I lean in, and ask, what are the epistemological implications of knowledge that is created by partially unconscious human beings, done with or on partially unconscious human beings, and consumed and disseminated by partially unconscious human beings?In depth psychology, we research the logic of the psyche with our psyche; we are the instrument through which we conduct our research. And again, I ask, what are the epistemological implications for knowledge created by a partially unconscious psyche, a partially unknown and unknowable instrument? My graduate students have long since leftbehind any fantasy of objectivity or they wouldn't have chosen this field, but they aren't quite yet ready for such a radical subjectivity. It troubles them. It troubles me.Not only is psyche the main and unshakeable instrument of the researcher (try leaving your psyche at home when you conduct research in the world), its ontological foundation, but psyche can also be seen as an epistemology, a way of knowing. Depth psychologists know through the products the psyche produces autonomously, through dreams, fantasies, and associations, through intuitions, synchronicities, and hunches, through obsessions, disturbances, and symptoms. A classic example is the dream of German chemist Friedrich A. Kekule in 1865 which led to his insight that the molecular structure of benzene is a closed carbon ring, a discovery that revolutionized modern chemistry. This is a very tidy example; most of us have dozens of dreams a night that produce no such clear insight, no such incontrovertible knowledge. As such, depth psychology is a suspicious epistemology; just as Freud was suspicious of dreams and separated the manifest content from the latent meaning when researching the psyche, so depth psychology offers us a language for the gap between the manifest content of our research and the latent meaning we subscribe, or fail to subscribe to it.This raises an important ethical consideration in a depth psychological approach to research; the notion of the unconscious undermines fundamentalism and absolutism in the researcher's conclusions. As one of my colleagues says, 'I'm right about half of what I say, but I don't know which half it is.' This makes depth psychology an epistemology of not knowing as much as knowing, of unknowing as much as the unknown. And, it makes depth psychology a tiring epistemology.By the time we finish the Foundations for Research in Depth Psychology course, my students are exhausted by everything they won't know and can't know about their own research. I give them an example. One of my dissertation students was researching the topic of home; in particular, how women in transitional housing projects make a house a home. …