Ensouling Family Therapy

Dickey, Judith Ann. (2003). Ensouling Family Therapy (Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2003). UMI No. 3155820.

This dissertation reflects upon the nature of family therapy and what the zeitgeist asks of it. The purpose of this hermeneutically framed thematic study is to investigate the need to tend soul within family therapy. Soul is seen as secular, the feminine function of empathy and beingness, and as sacred, an image, beyond time and space linking matter to Spirit.

When family therapy was born in the 1940s, soulfulness was embedded within the culture. It was not needed in family therapy. Working to improve family relationships and increase maturity was enough. Sixty years later, family therapy responding to a youth-culture, emphasizes brief, goal-oriented therapy. The contemporary family, situated within a culture of shifting mythologies, needs more than traditional family therapy can offer, With the exception of a few theorists, it does not help families, especially the young and immature, to cope with overwhelming emotions stemming from the collective unconscious and the emergence of new mythologies. This thesis asserts that the theories and practices of Jungian and archetypal psychology solve this problem when partnered with family therapy.

The marriage provides therapists with five levels of interventions: the personal family, the personal unconscious, the collective unconscious, the world soul, and a spiritual level, and with multiple means of soul-making. Family system theory expands to include archetypal networks. By tending soul, family therapy transforms into a transpersonal psychology, capable of dealing with non-ego material. The search for meaning, purpose, and Joy, and the enrichment of experience, changes the tone and texture. Two case studies, of a shamed son and a family with a disorder of nurturance, illustrate the complexity and helpfulness of tending two sides of one coin, the concrete family and their household gods. The premise is that any healing is more stable.

The overall conclusion is that soul-tending is vitally needed to help families temper a mythic culture, build stamina to meet numinous forces, and cultivate a more soulful future. The youth culture's problem with splitting good and evil and a transgenerational projection of cultural shadows necessitates not only tending soul but healing shame. Ensouling family therapy becomes an art form of Love.