Laurel McCabe's Orientation & Philosophy

My Orientation and Philosophy

I teach courses on various aspects of adult development. My orientation in everything is developmental in the broadest sense: how do we grow, change, and live creatively in adulthood? How do various theories of development help us understand ourselves and our society? How does attention to our deepest selves help us in transformation and creativity? How do emotions tap into our transformational process? Can we work symbolically to help us understand our growing edge? What kinds of environments and people help us in this? How does this impact our relationships, our work, our society? Do women and men have different issues and questions in their lives, different tasks? How can we understand this?

My orientation is one of questioning, attending, listening, formulating new questions and understanding. I see my teaching as part of an ongoing process of developing voice in myself and those around me, and making a commitment to living creatively: allowing the seeds of ourselves to grow and develop. I try to make my classes be a place where students can encounter new information, can think new thoughts,can have their worldviews challenged and opened up, can venture out into new avenues of expression and experience.

My orientation over the years is increasingly Jungian. Jungian psychology is an approach which helps us understand the deep movements of the psyche: why we behave the way we do, what deeper influences affect us, what mystery lives within each of us. Jungian psychology provides methods for working with one's own unique essence, and developing toward the person who one, in essence, is. This is Jung's notion of individuation.

As I am an educator, I believe that my place in the University is to help students in their own individuation process: to help them develop knowledge of how to work with their own great inner capacity; to assist them in becoming what they in essence are. In this sense I carry very well the founding spirit of the Department, which was one of humanistic psychology, self-actualization, and creativity.

While I am not an artist, I use art process and art techniques in many of my classes. They are symbolic media for exploring the hidden aspects of the self; they provide another venue, other than the linguistic, for contacting and knowing oneself.

Depth Psychology M.A. Program

In 1999 I founded and began coordinating the Psychology Department's M.A. Program in Depth Psychology. This is a 2-year Master's program which provides education in the theory of Jungian psychology, as well as training in what I call the methods of depth inquiry. Depth inquiry uses the skills developed in therapeutic work by Jungian analysts, and applies them to educational investigative inquiry. These skills include active imagination, dreamwork, art process work, work with myth and story, work with ritual, mask work, work with sound, movement, and breath. At its broadest, all of these are techniques in symbolic work: they work with aspects of oneself via a symbolic holder or container.

Dialogue Series

I also coordinate the Dialogue Series, which started in the Psychology Department in 1996. The Dialogue Series is taking a break this year; I hope it will be back in 2004. It is a lecture series bringing interesting people in and out of the field of psychology to come for an hour at noon to talk about their work. They talk about who they are, what they do, how they've gotten to where they are now, what moves them in their life and work. It's an exciting assortment of people who are practicing creativity in their lives and who may inspire us to do the same.