Rachael Vaughan
Associate Professor
Applied Psychology MA in Mandarin
Counseling Psychology
Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion
Integral Counseling Psychology
School of Professional Psychology and Health
Pronouns: she/they
Email: rvaughan@ciis.edu
Phone: 415-938-7806
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
The Living Universe
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.
Other publications
It’s Time to End the Myth of Emotional Self-Sufficiency. Common Ground Magazine, February 2016.
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.