Laurel McCabe

My Education & Training

I received my B.A. in English Literature, Magna cum Laude, from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. I studied poetry and the Romantic poets there, and my honors thesis was a phenomenological analysis of two of John Keats' poems. I was an admirer of Merleau-Ponty's work at the time, and I managed to combine two of my loves into my thesis. (!) One of Keats' poems, Ode to Psyche, images the poet as the creator of the world in which he lives. The theme of the poet as creator of meaning, and of world, still lives with me. I believe that poetry is like original speech for us: that we all have access to the poetic sensibility and to the poetic vision. Today I see my work in Jungian psychology as an extension of that early foray into the imagination.

I received my M.A. (1987) and my Ph.D. (1994) in Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. I studied adult development, broadly conceived, at Berkeley. I worked with Ravenna Helson on her longitudinal study of Mills College graduates, and acquired an expertise in women's and adult development, as well as emotions. My dissertation was entitled Emotional Development in Adult Married Women. I developed a way of conceptualizing emotional development in adulthood, operationalized it, and correlated many indices of emotional development and emotional expression, with personality, cognitive, and ego development measures. I also studied Jungian psychology with James Jarrett, a philosopher of education. The depths, complexities, and subtleties of Jungian psychology opened up in my studies with him.

I received additional training in Clinical Psychology at the California School of Professional Psychology. My internship was at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, in the Department of Psychiatry. I also trained at CSPP's Psychological Services Center in Berkeley, as well as at a place called Cancer Support Community in San Francisco, which I believe is no longer operating. I did a post-doctoral internship at Counseling / Psychological Services at Sonoma State.

Following my doctorate, I worked as a therapist in the community in Berkeley and Santa Rosa, as a Psychological Assistant. I closed my practice in May of 2002 to devote more time to the University and to writing.

I began teaching at Sonoma State in 1994, after receiving my doctorate.

| Home Page | Education & Training | Orientation | Courses | Publications | Reweaving the Broken Web | Dialogue Series | Depth Psychology M.A. | Interests | Contact Me