ABOUT
They don’t call me when the numbers are down; the world is full of people who can read a spreadsheet. They don’t call me when a process is broken; any decent consulting mechanic can fix a corporate machine. They call me when the building feels haunted. They call me when the nightmares keep recurring. My work begins when an organisation’s carefully constructed reality starts to fray at the edges, when a strange, irrational energy begins to bleed through the cracks of the org chart, and the leaders find themselves baffled by a problem that has no name. They call me when the story they’ve been telling themselves no longer makes sense, and a frightening new one is trying to be born.
This is the work of Deep Psychology. It is not the psychology of the laboratory or the clinic; it is the psychology of the theatre, the temple, and the artist’s studio. It understands that to get from atoms to artworks, from quarks to QAnon, you need more than a theory of mind; you need a theory of imagination. It is a psychological practice dedicated to reading the invisible patterns, the archetypal forces, and the foundational myths that silently govern our lives, our businesses, and our cultures. It does not seek to reduce the glorious, terrifying complexity of human behaviour to a set of predictable variables. Instead, it offers a way to navigate that complexity with wisdom, creativity, and courage.
DEEP PSYCHOLOGY
Deep Psychology is the natural progression of psychological understanding, moving beyond analytical and clinical enquiry and working in the areas of human psychology that are typically neglected by the objective and analytical approaches that seek to understand why humans do the things we do. I call it Deep Psychology because it goes beyond, below and above the austerely conventional scientific models of human behaviour. Rather than being a psychological process that is to be found in a clinic or a laboratory, Deep Psychology works in the areas of culture, arts, the humanities and imagination.
It is the psychology of the fundamental patterns of human behaviour that may seem paradoxical and ambiguous and so are ignored by those wishing to see human behaviour as something predictable and machine-like where the brain is simply considered to be a collection of molecules or a digital computer. Deep Psychology reveals these deeper fundamental patterns that continually emerge from human behaviour, and how they manifest in anthropological and cultural outcomes.
And because of that, it enables us to move beyond the old biochemical, socio-historical and personal behaviour based perspectives of conventional psychology.Instead of trying to reduce the complexity of human behaviour to simplistic binary outcomes, Deep Psychology works in those liminal zones of mythology, religion, art, epic, drama, ritual, and creativity. The mysteries of human behaviour, both individually and collectively, are most effectively explored by using the power of Deep Psychology.