Building Psyche: Reflections and the Load-Bearing Wall:

As I sit here reflecting, thinking back, and feeling back, this first year evokes a kaleidoscope of images. The images preceding Pacifica have faded from fantasy into lived reality. Starting class in the fall of 2025 was exciting and at once challenging. By day, I live as a construction company owner; by night, an iconoclastic dilettante moonlighting as a burgeoning writer and researcher. The coursework immediately spotlighted the split between my professional and vocational life.

One reason I came to Pacifica was to have my blind spots, inflations, and interpretive bias challenged and refined by peers and professors. The program’s foundational material helped shed new light on topics I was familiar with. Nuance emerged between the material and my independent formulations. Some of my romanticizations surrounding C. G. Jung were confronted. I faced a choice: practice holding the tension and adapt, evolve without judgment, and allow the possibility to open new ways of knowing, or remain at the price of growth. My metaphorical load-bearing structures between the personal and the vocational came into clear view.

By design, our cohort began the first year exploring psychology’s forebears. Examining the antecedents of depth psychology helped me locate the field within psychology at large. The curriculum helped to relativize the impacts of the Cartesian subject-object split in contrast to Jungian theory. Christine Downing’s Sigmund Freud’s Mythology was revelatory. She argues that many of the negative stigmas culture has assigned to Freud may result from mistranslations. The Discovery of the Unconscious gave me deeper context for the prevailing nineteenth-century Western colonial backdrop and helped me situate C. G. Jung between natural and human science. A close reading of Memories, Dreams and Reflections and the death to the author felt like a small death to me: the image I held of C. G. Jung collapsed, and a new, equally appreciable image arose in its place.

I questioned my worldview more deeply, in light of the times in which I live, and wondered about my unconscious splits. Reading The Symbolic Quest again took on new meaning within the academic environment, and the weekly assignments helped me tease out specificity I missed on prior reading. The image as an a priori source for meaning-making that extends beyond logic helped clarify the terms: image, symbol, complex, and archetype with precision.

Hermeneutical dimensions opened, and new questions surfaced. An ongoing dialogue persisted; internal images and external objects carried greater fidelity and animistic life force. Where is the loss of the symbolic in my life? What are the consequences of neglecting my soul? Why do I find some people provocative and others not, and what qualities does that reveal about my shadow? What are the splits I cannot see? Each course is a dialogue with the psyche. Introduction to Depth and The Individuation Journey, Tending the Living Images and Jung in Context, Complexes and Archetypes, Reflective Studies and Indigenous Perspectives; each course pairing for each term across the first year is carefully selected and crafted to be complementary yet opposites. Logos and Eros go together, acting on the deeper layers of the personal and the collective, the student and the cohort. Each term adds structural layers like the construction of a physical home. However, these are intangible materials woven together by often contradictory functions working in concert: thinking, feeling, intuiting, and sensing.

Through JABR, I have discovered that the deeply personal is not always a liability to professional research. The program has helped validate that phenomenological insight may provide an epistemology, but that doesn’t always equal immunity. Scholarship and tenderness need not be split and can be held in unison. I build homes, and I am learning to build arguments. The load-bearing wall is the same: one psyche and the other matter; both require tending with a commitment to depth, or the structure fails.