Hercules personifies fighting the underworld and resisting its wisdom, and he also represents the strength needed to overcome the destructive power of the unconscious – to tame Cerberus, the three-headed watchdog of Hades. It takes profound courage, willpower, and determination to face unconscious content, turn toward our traumas and our embodied

Christianity calls the totality of divine powers pleroma, from the Greek pleˉreˉs, meaning “full.” Our work is to become full, or whole. During his six-year descent into the unconscious, Jung referred to the pleroma as a dark abyss full of nothingness and fullness.20 A paradoxical emptiness containing all opposites from which God manifests.

“The hero myth,” psychologist Keiron Le Grice explains, “carries the individualism of the West to its logical conclusion, fulfilling the Western spiritual ideal, leading the individual self to its own transformation through the inner encounter with the depths of the psyche and spirit.”7 Adapting the character of the Western mind and culture, the

Depth psychology is a psychology of darkness, a way of experiencing ourselves and life, an approach to the inner world that seeks to know what we don’t yet know about ourselves. It focuses on the source of a problem rather than alleviating (or obliterating or masking) symptoms. Its aim is to care, not cure – to dive, not repair. It explores the

The underworld journey is universal, common to all cultures, religions, people, and places. In his study of burial rites, Robert Pogue Harrison notes that the word humanity derives from the Latin humus, meaning “earth” and “bury.”3 To be human means to place parts of ourselves underground and then to enter the dark places of our world to carry out

To feel safe enough to journey into darkness, we need a sense of self that reflects reality and that we feel comfortable with. Otherwise, veering from familiar spaces can disintegrate edifices we’ve built and leave us adrift. A client once told me that if she were to make the changes we were talking about, she wouldn’t know who she was. If we

If we put the underworld on a competitive scale, we discredit the many shades of darkness. In fact, comparing in this way is a form of denial of the profundity of the impact of even “small things” on the nervous system.

Following in Jung’s footsteps, James Hillman (1926–2011) – an American psychologist who studied at and then was Director of Studies at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich, Switzerland – founded “archetypal psychology,” a post-Jungian approach rooted in the archetypal basis of psyche. Archetypal psychology focuses on the myriad fantasies and myths

Depth psychology arose in the 19th century as a response to the religious, scientific, and personal changes in the Western mind and way of life. Reacting to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on empiricism, individualism, and reason, depth psychology sought to balance exploration of the inner world with scientific inquiry. It used the methodology of the