Research Interests

Ethnopsychology

Ecopsychology

Cultural critique

Biography

Born in Asia and raised primarily in Europe, Rachael has a lifelong, passionate interest in issues of culture, identity and inclusion. She has a bilingual therapy practice in English and French. She writes the Ethnopsychology Blog, and has studied French approaches to psychotherapy, such as ethnopsychiatry and genealogical psychology. Her teaching is informed by multiple cultural perspectives, including post-colonial and feminist theory.

Corporate bullying, the trauma of work, and issues of psychological colonization are an area of interest and engagement for her, and she works daily with issues of oppression and liberation with clients in her practice. Her doctoral research explored the way the West’s historical identification with the hero archetype has led to colonialism, capitalism and empire as well as the domination of the natural world, all of which has led us to the current Anthropocene crisis. Her work emphasizes the urgent need to switch to a post-heroic paradigm.

For Rachael, passionate engagement with both the political and the depth-psychological is no contradiction. The motto of her alma mater is animae mundi colendae gratia: “for the sake of tending the soul of the world”. She is a member of the Climate Psychology Alliance, and as an academic concerned with the global climate emergency, she has joined NoFlyClimateSci.

Rachael works with process art, nature art and dreams as a window to the personal and collective psyche. She has studied advanced dreamwork with Dr Stephen Aizenstat. She is particularly interested in the somatics of dreaming, and in how symbol, metaphor and movement mediate between implicit and explicit memory.

Rachael has a twenty-year dance movement practice, and an active interest in eco-psychology, grounded in gardening, nature art and rural life. She has taken refuge vows in the Shambhala lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. Rachael also teaches in the Chinese MA in Applied Psychology.

Education

California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA: Doctor of Philosophy with a concentration in Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness

Pacifica Graduate Institute, Carpinteria, CA: Master of Arts in Depth Psychology and Counseling

University of Edinburgh, Scotland: MA Honors, Theoretical Linguistics 

Courses

Jungian Dreamwork

Ecopsychology

Psychopathology

Transpersonal Psychology

Integrative Seminar

Group Dynamics

Multicultural Counseling

Eco Emotions

Publications

Doctoral Dissertation (open access)

Ithaca on Fire: How the West’s Obsession With the Hero Has Led Us to the End of the World

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Why Bother? On Whether Individual Eco-Actions Count. Ecopsychology, 2021. 

Hidden in Plain Sight: How Therapists Miss Cultural Trauma in White Clients. In Jungian Perspectives on Indeterminate States: Betwixt and Between Borders. Edited by Elizabeth Brodersen and Pilar Amezaga. Routledge, UK, 2020.

The Hero Versus the Initiate: The Western Ego Faced with Climate Chaos. Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies. Vol 15, No 1, 2020.

Last Traces of the Pagan Imagination: The Cultural Unconscious in British Magical Children’s Literature. The Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche. Vol 12, Issue 3, 2018.

Finding the Feet: Treating Immigration-Related Trauma in Children. Fort/Da: The Journal of the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytical Psychology. Vol XXIII, No 1, Spring 2017.

Freeing the Id: Deconstructing the Colonial Basis to Freud’s Ego/Id/Superego. Journal of Radical Psychology, Spring 2005, Vol 4, Issue 1.

Other publications

It’s Time to End the Myth of Emotional Self-Sufficiency. Common Ground Magazine, February 2016.

Worked Out: On the Chronic and Pervasive Trauma of Corporate Life. The New Therapist Magazine, Winter 2010.

Conference Papers

The Archetype of the Green Man and the Non-Toxic Masculine. Joint presentation with Jack Gescheidt, at the Women Rising Conference CIIS, October 2018.

Hidden in Plain Sight: How Therapists Miss Cultural Trauma in White Clients. Conference paper at the International Association for Jungian Studies conference Frankfurt, Germany, August 2018.

Plant Allies: An Investigation. Conference paper at Women and Mythology Conference Las Vegas, March 2018.