Presentation of the Graduates

M.A./Ph.D. Depth Psychology Program

Pacifica Graduate Institute Graduation May ‘09

Mary Watkins, Ph.D., Chair

On this day of acknowledgment I have two to make before I turn directly to you, our graduates. First, while I am standing before you today as the chair of this program, I want to appreciate my colleagues who have over the years of your studies sequentially shared the mantle and responsibilities of this role of chair: Joe Coppin, David Bona, and Jennifer Selig. I thank you--and I know the graduates thank you -- for your leadership, dedication, collaborative spirit, and hard work. Second, I want to evoke in our “thought of the heart” the presence of James Hillman whose life work of archetypal psychology has so deeply mentored the structure and the content of the Depth Psychology Program. I am happy to share that he is recovering very well from two surgeries. I would like to send him our blessings and our deep appreciation.

On the threshold of the 21st century, in an essay called “Laying the Table”, Hillman  advocated that psychology found itself on three archetypal and universal dominants: Destiny, Justice, and Beauty. Each of our graduates today has responded to this call and has contributed to this re-founding. Destiny:  Hillman describes destiny as our  “mythical sense of life.” It announces itself, he says, when we get that feeling about our life that “something is meant, something is wanted, something is living alongside my life, nudging, urging, sometimes grabbing the wheel and setting another course.”  Today your family, friends, and teachers celebrate you because of your successful embrace of your vocation,  calling, destiny. They have witnessed you faithfully following a path that often only you could discern; indeed, sometimes not even you could make it out. This program cultivates what Hillman calls “The thought of the heart.” At the root of the word heart is courage. You found the courage to look clearly at the dilemmas of our time—no small undertaking.

These graduates have engaged in studies that grounded them in the history and evolution of schools of depth psychology, as well as embracing the interdisciplinary nature of depth psychology in order to be able to better grasp the complexities and poetics of human being-- studies of literature, mythology, philosophy, history, alchemy, and the sacred. They were challenged to bring depth psychology from the clinic into the world, following and fulfilling Pacifica’s guiding words: Animae mundi colendae gratia. For the sake of tending soul in and of the world. [To the audience, naming some of the specific fieldwork undertaken by the graduates.] In their community and ecological fieldwork and research, they found themselves working in communities divided by different versions of history, as well as in those battered by natural disasters. With and for young people they explored the creation of school gardens, the practice of mentorship, the potentialities and the perils of the internet as a placeless space, alternative educational practices, the creation of communities for teens that support their health and alternatives to violence, and the revision of our understanding of obsessive compulsive challenges in children. Some sought to understand the sacred springs of joy and resistance that grace us with music, prayer, and dance, while others turned to comfort those in grief and to prepare people to be more full-heartedly present at the end of life.

Destiny, Justice, Beauty. Justice says Hillman is that goddess that “lies in the root of … the city”, “giving each its rightful place to belong,” that which Hillman says “maintains in all creatures “their claims to mutually dependent existence.” These graduates have taken up a study of psychology that understands that psychological well-being can not be achieved without attention to the procurement of justice, that the health of each is dependent on the health of the woods, the river, the soil and air, the family, the neighborhood, the culture, and its relationships to other cultures. They have answered a call to attend to the interconnection of psyche, culture, and nature. Courage indeed was needed for this course of studies that broke the self-imposed borders of psychology, asking these graduates to step in the gaps between disciplines to borrow what was needed to create the understandings that are necessary.

Hillman calls upon us to see Beauty as the third pillar we need to support psychology. He calls beauty “divine enhancement—that’s what strikes the heart, stops us up, catches our breath, calls us, and can shine forth from suddenly anything, anywhere, anytime.” “What could be more fundamental,” he asks, than this “longing for beauty”? As you in the audience listen this afternoon to the titles of our graduates’ dissertations note what strikes your heart and catches your breath. Each of you, our graduates, has brought forth a dissertation work that has that rare and beautiful glow of a creative piece that could be done by no one else on earth. Destiny, justice, beauty.

COMMENCEMENT SPEECH 2009