What is Depth Psychology?

This paper takes up a deceptively simple question: what is depth psychology? The question is deceptively simple because, as I hope to show, depth psychology resists neat definition. It is not so much a single theory or method than a way of attending to the unconscious dimensions of the psyche as they reveal themselves through dreams, symbols, myths, and lived experience. To explore this question, I draw on two intertwined sources: the historical record of how the field came to understand itself, and my own lived experience of psychological descent and transformation.

This paper unfolds in several movements. It begins with a personal narrative describing a period of profound loss in my own life, a descent that I would later come to recognize, through the language of depth psychology, as a form of initiation. From there, I turn to the question of definition itself, considering why depth psychology has so often been described as something that cannot be fully defined. I then trace the history of the field as Ellenberger (1970) presents it, moving from ancient practices of soul retrieval through Mesmer’s animal magnetism, Nietzsche’s philosophy of the unconscious, Janet’s psychological automatism, Freud’s psychoanalysis, Adler’s individual psychology, and Jung’s concept of individuation. Finally, I turn to more recent voices who continue to reshape the field today. Throughout, I return to my own descent as the lens through which this history first became understandable to me.

My Story

There was a moment that divided my life into a before and an after. For fifteen years, I had devoted myself almost entirely to motherhood. I homeschooled my children, structured my days around their needs, and poured my energy into creating a meaningful life for them. Motherhood was the organizing principle of my identity. My sense of purpose, belonging, and direction were woven tightly into my role as a mother. I had three teenage boys from a previous marriage, a two-year-old son with my husband, and I was pregnant with my fifth child. Then, in a single conversation, the life I had built began to unravel.

One afternoon, my three older boys returned from a weekend with their father. They sat down on the couch and told me that he was moving away and that they would be moving with him; they would no longer be homeschooled but would be attending public school. In that moment, it felt as though the ground beneath me disappeared. While I managed to remain composed in front of them, inwardly something shattered. The psychic structure upon which I had built my life was collapsing. What I loved most seemed to have been torn from my hands. What followed was the deepest grief I have ever known; it was a descent.

In the language of depth psychology, I was entering the underworld. The identity that had sustained me for years was dissolving, and with it came a profound confrontation with meaninglessness. The maternal role through which I had understood myself could no longer contain the totality of who I was becoming. There were moments when I felt I had lost not only my children but also my reason for living; yet the darkness showed itself not to be empty.

As the descent deepened, figures began appearing in dreams, imaginal experiences, and moments of profound inner knowing. Archetypal presences emerged from the depths of the unconscious, particularly manifestations of the dark aspect of the Great Mother. They seemed to arise from a place deeper than personal memory, carrying an intelligence that felt ancient and transpersonal.

Again and again, I asked the same question: Why was what I loved most taken from me? In one particularly powerful encounter, I found myself standing before Hekate, the ancient Greek goddess of crossroads, thresholds, and the underworld; it was in a moment that I was overcome with grief. As I looked at her through my tears, I noticed something unexpected. She, too, was crying. There was a single tear upon her face. Instantly, I recognized it: a tear of profound compassion. In that moment, something shifted within me. I understood that what was happening was not punishment, abandonment, or evidence that life had gone wrong; rather, as depth psychology says, I was being initiated. The loss itself was functioning as a psychic death, dismantling an identity that had become too small for the life that was seeking expression through me.

I had long been initiated by the light mother through pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, nurturing, and devotion. Now I was being initiated by the dark mother. Through this descent, aspects of myself that had remained buried in the unconscious began to emerge. Here, I encountered strengths I had never fully claimed, boundaries I had never fully embodied, truths I had been afraid to speak, and instincts I had learned to suppress. What was loss also slowly exposed itself as transformation. This was the paradox at the heart of the journey: while I was losing what I loved most, I was also finding myself.

C.G. Jung referred to this process as individuation: the lifelong movement toward wholeness through the integration of previously unconscious aspects of the psyche. My suffering began to acquire meaning. I learned to hold the tension of opposites rather than resolve it prematurely: joy and sorrow, birth and death, presence and absence, light and darkness. Instead of choosing one side against the other, I discovered that psychological maturity required making room for both.

Looking back, I can see that this descent marked the beginning of my relationship with depth psychology. It was lived experience that led me to the field. Depth psychology gave me a language for what had happened. It helped me understand that the underworld is not only a place of suffering, it is also a place of revelation and that the two go together. What felt like an ending became the beginning of a deeper relationship with my own soul.

Depth Psychology

So what is Depth Psychology? If we look at the etymology of the word, depth psychology is the practice of listening to the soul’s (psyche) speech (logos) from beneath the waters of ordinary awareness (depth). It is an attempt to hear the deeper meanings hidden within dreams, symbols, myths, and longings, the quiet language through which the psyche reveals itself. Keiron Le Grice (2024) writes that “depth psychology has brought to light the existence of a hidden order in the unconscious mind, in the form of configurations of complexes, drives, and instincts, conditioning human experience from a dimension of the mind beyond our conscious awareness and beyond the control of our personal will. Depth psychology has also helped the modern individual reclaim something akin to a mythic perspective on life” (p.4).

This is precisely the language I encountered in the months after my sons left, in dreams, in the image of Hekate’s single tear, and in sudden eruptions of grief and knowing that seemed to rise from somewhere far older than my own history. Long before I had a name for any of it, I was living depth psychology’s central claim: that something beneath ordinary awareness is always speaking, and that our task is to learn to listen.

However, it has been said that this concept cannot be defined. For how can you define something that seems to have always been, had no beginning, is in constant transformation and dynamism, and exists in the hidden and unforeseen realms? We speak of depth psychology as if it were a method that has been created by someone in the field of psychology, similar to developmental psychology or behaviorism, yet depth psychology is no such thing. It is a way of being, a way of perceiving, and it is more akin to religion than any psychological method. And if we do classify it as a religion, it would be a universal religion that can be applied to all people everywhere, although depending upon who it is being woven through the way it looks will vary dramatically. While much of the origins of depth psychology often get attributed to Freud, Adler, and Jung, it begins way before this.

The History of Depth Psychology

According to The Discovery of the Unconscious, Henri F. Ellenberger (1970) argues that depth psychology did not suddenly appear with Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung. Rather, it emerged through a long historical evolution stretching from ancient healing practices to modern psychodynamic theories. Ellenberger reports that “historical and anthropological research has brought forth important documents and revealed evidence of the use among primitive and ancient peoples of many of the methods used by modern psychotherapy” (p. 3). Long before the emergence of modern psychology, many ancient cultures understood illness through the lens of the soul. Disease was often believed to occur when the soul left the body or was captured by spirits. Healing, therefore, required restoring what had been lost. Ellenberger writes:

Among all primitive disease theories probably none is stranger to us than the idea of soul loss. Nothing is further from our principles of treatment than the restoration of a lost soul to a patient. And yet, if we ignore the cultural element and seek the roots of facts, we may find a common ground between those primitive concepts and ours. Do we not say that our mental patients are “alienated,” “estranged” from themselves, that their ego is impoverished or destroyed? Could not the therapist who gives psychotherapy to a severely deteriorated schizophrenic patient by trying to establish a contact with the remaining healthy parts of the personality and to reconstruct the ego be considered the modern successor of those shamans who set out to follow the tracks of a lost soul, trace it into the world of spirits, and fight against the malignant demons detaining it, and bring it back to the world of the living? (p. 9)

This passage reveals something essential about depth psychology: while its language changes across cultures and historical periods, its central concern remains extremely consistent. Whether expressed as soul loss, alienation, repression, or fragmentation, depth psychology has repeatedly sought to understand what happens when human beings become separated from essential parts of themselves and how that connection might be restored. Although the forms it takes evolve alongside culture, the underlying quest remains the same.

When I first read this passage, I recognized myself in it. In the months following my sons’ departure, I often described myself, to myself, using exactly these words: estranged, alienated, as though some essential part of me had been taken and I no longer knew where to find it. What I needed, without yet having any word for it, was something closer to the shaman’s task as Ellenberger describes it: a retrieval, a journey back to what had been lost so that it could be carried home again.

One of the first major turning points in depth psychology occurred during the eighteenth century. Father Johann Joseph Gassner, an unassuming country priest, became widely known for performing public exorcisms in which he claimed to expel evil spirits from the afflicted (Ellenberger, 1970). Gassner distinguished between illnesses that were biological in origin and therefore belonged to physicians, and those that were “preternatural,” caused by sorcery, demonic influence, or possession. Working entirely within a religious framework, he maintained that healing depended upon faith in Jesus Christ. Yet even as Gassner interpreted suffering through spiritual eyes, another figure was preparing the way for a more psychological understanding of human distress. Franz Anton Mesmer would preserve the notion that unseen forces influence health while radically altering how those forces were understood.

Mesmer agreed that invisible influences played a role in illness and healing (Ellenberger, 1970). However, “Mesmerism” shifted attention away from demons and spirits and toward natural processes operating within the individual. Mesmer believed that an invisible life force moved through all living beings, nature, and the cosmos itself. He called this force animal magnetism, using the term animal in its original sense of “living” rather than referring to animals. In his view, physical and psychological illness emerged when this vital energy became blocked, stagnant, or imbalanced. Healing occurred when harmony was restored and the individual once again flowed in rhythm with this universal force. While Mesmer’s theories would later be challenged, his work marked an important shift away from supernatural explanations and toward an exploration of unseen psychological processes.

As the nineteenth century progressed, attention increasingly turned inward. The question moved from what invisible forces affected human beings, to what hidden forces existed within the psyche itself. It is here that Friedrich Nietzsche emerges as a particularly intriguing figure. Nietzsche envisioned psychic energy as something that accumulates beneath the surface, waiting for the right conditions to be released (Ellenberger, 1970). At times only a small spark is needed to unleash a powerful surge from the depths of the psyche. He also believed this energy could be consciously redirected, transformed, and harnessed toward higher aims. Through Nietzsche’s lens, the psyche becomes a living field of competing drives and instincts, while emotions reveal themselves as complex constellations of unconscious desires, images, and acts of will.

This is precisely what I experienced in the conversation that divided my life into a before and an after. On its surface, nothing about that afternoon was catastrophic; my sons simply told me they were moving away. Yet it was enough to release something that had clearly been accumulating for years: an entire identity, already strained past what it could hold, waiting only for the smallest spark to reconstruct it.

Nietzsche was among the earliest thinkers to articulate a sophisticated understanding of the unconscious (Ellenberger, 1970). He conceived of “the unconscious as an area of confused thoughts, emotions, and instincts, at the same time as an area of reenactment of past stages of the individual and of the species” (p. 273). He also anticipated concepts that would later become central to psychoanalysis, including “sublimation, repression, and the turning of instincts towards oneself” (p. 277). In many ways, Nietzsche stood at the threshold of modern depth psychology, influencing both Freud and Adler while exerting a particularly profound influence on Jung. Another figure that emerged following Nietzche that also had a solid influence was Pierre Janet.

Janet was one of the initial figures in modern dynamic psychiatry, although his influence is often overlooked. Many ideas later associated with other psychologists can be traced back to him, including the term “subconscious” (Ellenberger, 1970). His theories influenced Freud, Adler, and Jung strongly. For example, Jung’s concept of complexes also closely resembled Janet’s idea of subconscious fixed ideas, and Adler acknowledged that his work on inferiority feelings developed from Janet’s observations of feelings of incompleteness. Freud and also engaged with Janet’s research on hysteria and the healing of psychological symptoms by bringing unconscious material into awareness.

Despite these contributions, Janet’s influence gradually faded. Around 1900, many believed he would become the founder of a major psychological school, but over time he was often reduced to being remembered only for his work on hypnosis, hysteria, and obsessive symptoms. His broader theories about the structure of personality, consciousness, and psychological functioning were largely overlooked. Janet’s decline in recognition was partly due to conflicts with other schools of thought, especially those surrounding Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis. Disputes over who first developed ideas about the unconscious, trauma, and cathartic treatment contributed to the marginalization of Janet’s work. Although his ideas continued influencing psychiatry and psychology, his role as a major pioneer was often overshadowed by figures who came after him.

Sigmund Freud was one of these figures who sought to investigate these hidden processes systematically through clinical observation. With Freud, the unconscious moved from philosophical speculation into the center of a new psychological science. Freud developed psychoanalysis and the ideas of instincts, repression, and the unconscious (Freud, 1989). According to Freud, “an ‘instinct’ appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body” (p. 566). Regarding repression, Freud believed that “one of the vicissitudes an instinctual impulse may undergo is to meet with resistances which seek to make it inoperative…the impulse then passes into the state of ‘repression’…Repression is a preliminary stage of condemnation, something between flight and condemnation; it is a concept which could not have been formulated before the time of psychoanalytic studies” (p. 569).

It appears that the continuing thread that seems strongest between the work of Freud and Jung is regarding the unconscious. Freud believed that much of our mental life operates outside of conscious awareness. In psychoanalysis, he upheld that we must assume psychological processes are fundamentally unconscious, and that consciousness only perceives them indirectly, much as our senses perceive the external world. He suggested that this idea extends an ancient human tendency to project aspects of our own inner life onto the world around us, a tendency reflected in early forms of animism. For Freud, the psyche, like the physical world, cannot always be taken at face value. What appears to consciousness is not necessarily the full reality.

In his writings, Freud often used the word Seele, which is the German word for soul, although it is mostly mis-translated into English as “mind” or “mental structure” (Downing, 2000, p. 61). Freud’s concept of Seele (soul) echoes the ancient Greek myth of Psyche and Eros. In this story, the soul’s path toward becoming itself is set in motion through love, a love that inspires a person to accomplish what they might not have been able to achieve alone. The myth also tells of Psyche’s descent into the underworld, a necessary journey through suffering and transformation that ultimately allows her to become fully herself. Freud’s psychology was attempting to give the voice of speech to the soul (psyche-logos).

When I first encountered the myth of Psyche and Eros, I recognized it as my own story. Like Psyche, I did not choose my descent into the underworld; it arrived through love and through loss, on an ordinary afternoon, in an ordinary conversation on a couch. And like Psyche, I could not become fully myself until I had made that journey all the way through.

Alfred Adler had much in common with Freud. Ellenberger (1970) shares that the fundamental difference between Adler and Freud lies in what each was trying to understand about human nature. Freud sought to bring into psychology the hidden depths of the psyche that had long been sensed and portrayed by great storytellers, dramatists, and poets. Adler, by contrast, was less concerned with uncovering the unconscious depths and more interested in understanding people as they actually live and relate in the world. His individual psychology focused a practical, lived knowledge of human beings. What makes Adler’s approach unique is that it offers a coherent and comprehensive framework for understanding human behavior in everyday life, while also extending to the study of neurosis, psychosis, and even criminality.

Although Freud and Adler each contributed significantly to the development of depth psychology, it was Carl Gustav Jung who expanded the field beyond the personal unconscious and reintroduced questions of soul, myth, symbol, and spiritual meaning. In many respects, C.G. Jung’s work represents both a continuation of and a departure from the traditions that came before him.

For a length of time, C.G. Jung was a student of and worked closely with Freud. “During his association with Freud, he was the principal architect of the psychoanalytic movement, inaugurating the rite of training analysis, which became the dominant form of instruction in modern psychotherapy. His formulation of psychological types of introverts and extraverts with numerous sub-varieties has spawned countless questionnaires” (Shamdasani, 2003, p. 2). Shamdasani goes on to point out that for many people, Jung is almost inseparable from the ideas of the archetypes and the collective unconscious. These concepts have become the trademark of his work, often provoking either immediate fascination or outright rejection. Yet reducing Jung to these two ideas overlooks the remarkable complexity of his thought. Although his collected writings fill more than twenty volumes, a few key concepts came to carry an extraordinary amount of meaning.

The process of becoming who we are meant to be, what Jung called individuation, is another major contribution Jung gave to the field of depth psychology. He came into his insights about this through his own night sea journey, discovering that “the process in which he had been engaged had an aim; it led the individual to the discovery of the most intimate elements of his personality, the self. This progression from the unconscious to the conscious and from the ego to the self Jung named the individuation” (Ellenberger, 1970, p. 672). This is a lifelong process in which one comes into confrontation with the unconscious, the shadow, ego, persona, and the Self, often through a long, dark, and difficult passageway.

This was, I now understand, my own night sea journey. The shadow material that surfaced during those years, the persona of devoted homeschooling mother that could no longer hold the whole of who I was becoming, and the sense of a deeper Self calling from somewhere beyond that identity all map onto Jung’s individuation exactly.

Jung also brought the soul back into psychology alongside Freud in a way that had been grossly lacking. Much of his orientation in psychology was to demonstrate the presence of the soul (Ellenberger, 1970). Ellenberger shares: “Remarkable was the tone of Jung’s absolute conviction when speaking of the soul and the way he defined it as immaterial, transcendent, outside of time and space, and yet to be approached scientifically” (p. 689).

The progression outlined above is one reason Ellenberger’s work remains so influential: it situates depth psychology within humanity’s enduring attempt to understand the hidden dimensions of the soul. From ancient shamans retrieving lost souls, to Mesmer’s invisible energies, to Nietzsche’s depths of instinct, Janet’s subconscious realm, Freud’s unconscious, Adler’s lived psychology, and Jung’s individuation, a common thread can be discerned. Each, in their own way, sought to illuminate what lies beneath the surface of ordinary awareness. And each offers a different angle on the same descent I lived through: a movement from estrangement toward retrieval, from blockage toward flow, from repression toward expression, and finally toward the wholeness along the path of individuation.

To understand what depth psychology truly is, it is imperative to understand this history, which is what I have attempted to do here. “A distinctive trait of modern psychology and psychotherapy is their peculiarly historical identity. Contemporary psychoanalysis and Jungian psychology trace themselves back to Freud and Jung in a manner quite unlike other disciplines. Historical lineages and genealogies have provided important means of legitimation and authorization for current professionals, whilst these narratives themselves pass unexamined” (Shamdasani, 2003, p. 11). By examining these lineages, depth psychology reveals itself as an ongoing human endeavor to listen to the deeper speech of the soul.

Modern Depth Psychology

Post-Jungian thinker James Hillman (1972) states that “our field of depth psychology, of the psychology of the unconscious, as it has been called, does not know its father. Our psychology belongs to the tutelage of no God, has no patron saint, is enthralled to no muse” (p. 11). Hillman speaks about how, through Jung, depth psychology shifted from an empirical field into “an ontology of the soul based on archetypes” (p. 12). He goes on: “because this psychology takes into account the depths of the soul at its most subjective, transcendent, and impersonal level and assumes that personal behavior is derived from something beyond the personal, it attempts a true logos of the psyche” (p. 13). Hillman (1970) sides with calling the modern emergence of the current movement of the depth psychological tradition “archetypal psychology.” He explains this in saying that to describe this approach today as archetypal psychology reflects the evolution of Jung’s thought over time. When Jung first named his psychology, he had not yet fully developed the concept of the archetype, which would later become one of the central foundations of his work. Archetypes came to be understood as the deepest organizing patterns of psychic life, the underlying structures from which thoughts, emotions, images, and even the sense of self emerge. Archetypes also play a central role in healing and psychological transformation. As Jung’s thinking matured, he began to see that suffering was an expression of deeper archetypal dynamics seeking recognition. Rather than focusing solely on symptoms, diagnoses, or objective explanations, the task became uncovering the archetypal stories, images, and fantasies that live beneath what we call our problems. In this way, the psyche reveals itself as a living symbolic reality seeking meaning and expression.

Paris (2007) points out: “depth psychology is a general term that remains confusing because it defines all approaches that take into account the unconscious dimension of the psyche” (p. 83). Paris addresses the fact that psychology has, in the past, placed itself in the field of science. Yet she believes differently: “Depth psychology is not a natural science, never was, never will be. It was, is, and shall remain a part of the humanities. The mimesis of science, the language of hypothesis, the obsolete conceptual abstractions, the fake complexity when the real one is that of the psyche, the battles between schools (hiding a battle of egos), all of it is coming to a full stop as depth psychologists begin to speak evocatively instead of dogmatically” (p. 86). Paris suggests that depth psychology can stop trying to imitate the natural sciences and instead reclaim its true home within the humanities and the arts. Rather than focusing solely on curing every symptom or fixing every aspect of human suffering, depth psychology invites both practitioners and patients into a deeper pursuit of wisdom, imagination, meaning, and self-understanding.

So Really, What is Depth Psychology?

As one can see, defining depth psychology is not as simple as arriving at a concise definition. In many ways, we must circle around it, approaching it from different angles, only to discover that every answer opens into another question. The deeper we go, the more layers reveal themselves. Depth psychology is an ongoing unfolding, a continual revelation of deeper dimensions of the psyche. Perhaps this is where depth psychology is most truly understood: through experience, by living it. That is certainly how it found me, and as I hope this paper has shown, it has continued to find me in every theorist and every historical moment I have traced here. Ellenberger’s soul loss, Mesmer’s blocked energy, Nietzsche’s accumulating pressure, Janet’s subconscious, Freud’s repression and the myth of Psyche, Adler’s lived relationships, Jung’s individuation, Hillman’s archetypes, and Paris’s insistence on mystery over cure each name something I had already lived through.

For me, depth psychology is a way of engaging with life itself. It is the practice of listening beneath the surface, attending to dreams, symbols, emotions, stories, and symptoms as meaningful expressions of the psyche. It is a willingness to descend into the unknown places within ourselves and trust that something transformative may be found there. My own descent did not end with resolution in the conventional sense; my sons continue growing up at a distance, and that loss remains part of my life. But it gave me something else: a way of understanding that loss, a thread connecting my own story to the history of a field, of finding the meaning within it, and a sense that the work of depth psychology is never really finished. It simply continues, layer by layer, for as long as we are willing to keep listening.

 References

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Ellenberger, H. (1981). The discovery of the unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry. BasicBooks.

Freud, S. (1989). The Freud reader (P. Gay, Ed.). Norton.

Hillman, J. (1970). Why “archetypal” psychology? In B. Sells (Ed.), Working with images: The theoretical base of archetypal psychology (pp. 11-18). Spring Publications.

Hillman, J. (1972). What father’s psyche? In The myth of analysis (pp. 11-19). Harper Colophon Books.

Le Grice, K. (2024). The way of the archetypes: Volume I: Universal principles and          individuation. ITAS Publications.

Paris, G. (2007). Boundary issues: “You, science. Me, humanities. In Wisdom of the psyche: Depth psychology after neuroscience (pp. 79-91). Routledge.

Shamdasani, S. (2003). Prologue: “The most cursed dilettante.” In Jung and the making of modern psychology: The dream of a science (pp. 1-28). Cambridge.