Carl Gustav Jung dedicated his life to the rigorous exploration of the human psyche. Over the course of his career Jung treated hundreds of patients and worked tirelessly not solely as a dedicated clinician, but also as an investigator of unexplained phenomenon which included a rigorous analysis of his own lived-experience. In fact, Jung engaged in a lifelong empirical inquiry into the nature of his own psyche an undertaking of great personal discovery leading to a confrontation with his own unconscious. Jung explored many different embodied practices during his investigation, some of these inquiries along with his experiences were recorded in what is commonly referred to as The Red Book  or The Liber Novus. This personal inquiry was instrumental to the development of his theories of the collective unconscious, archetypes, and psychological types.

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Jung’s early scientific experiments, particularly the word association test, brought quantitative rigor to the investigation of the unconscious. By measuring emotional reactions and delayed responses to stimulus words, he was able to identify something unknown at work within the psyche. As a direct result of this scientific method Jung discovered measurable evidence that unconscious processes directly impacted consciousness and also de-limited behavior. This scientific method yielded direct proof that unconscious material manifest as spontaneous and autonomous expression referred to as the nature of the complex. A complex can be defined as a set of feeling-toned set of ideas, perceptions, and associations that coalesce around an archetypal core and whose manifestation is as unique as an individual fingerprint.

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Over the course of six decades, Jung not only investigated clinical case studies and the nature of his own inquiry, he also studied world religions, mythology, philosophy, and even ancient alchemical texts such as the Rosarium Philosophorum. As an expert thinker, medical doctor, psychologist, and empiricist,  Jung authored an extraordinary body of work during his lifetime, compiling over 20 volumes known today collectively as, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung.

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While Jung was deeply committed to the scientific study of inner life, he was also profoundly aware of the limitations of strict empiricism and encourage his patients to undertake many avenues to access and discover unconscious material held in the lived body. In fact, Jung encouraged his patients to engage in all sorts of embodied practices such as drawing, painting and dancing to uncover unconscious psychological material held in the body. As such, a Jungian approach is foundational to the understanding of the mind-body connection and instrumental to a clinical practice grounded in the intelligence of the lived-body and as a process that cultivates meaningful dialogue between conscious awareness and unconscious processes.

Ultimately, a depth psychological approach integrates introspection, symbolic amplification, and embodied therapeutic expressions and seeks to cultivate a living science that not only enlivens the therapeutic process it also brings greater nuance and complexity to the process of psychological development.