An Interdisciplinary Approach Toward the Enlivenment of Depth Psychology

Abstract

In this thesis emerging theories from the biological sciences, including Stuart Kauffman's radical emergence and the Poised Realm, Andreas Weber's enlivenment, Hildegard Kurt and Weber's poiesis, and Iain McGilchrist's description of the divided brain, were explored in relation to psychotherapy using a hermeneutical approach. Central to these theories was a drive to enliven a world deadened through Descartes's subject-object split, Newtonian physics, and the Enlightenment. Each of the theories presented restores an embodied subjectivity and opens humans to experiencing the world as alive. Weaving the theories through metaphorical play addressed the research question: How might recent concepts from theoretical biology and neuroscience enliven one's sense of psyche, the therapeutic relationship, and depth psychology? To play in that invisible space between implicit and explicit, subjective and objective, where there exists a vast capacity for living imagination and opening to being is a continuous process, as is the revisioning of psychology.