Directory

Rachael Vaughan, MFT, is a licensed psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, T-Group facilitator, trainer, and graduate school professor. She holds an MA in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, California, as well as an MA in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She has studied at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.

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 San Francisco and Marin county, seeing clients 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, as well as post-colonial and feminist theory.

Rachael’s interest in culture, politics, and group dynamics led her to train in T-Group facilitation and organizational dynamics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. 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.

For Rachael, passionate engagement with both the political and the depth-psychological is no contradiction. The motto of her alma mater isanimae mundi colendae gratia: “for the sake of tending the soul of the world”. Surely to tend the soul of the world must involve integrating the two.

As a Jungian-oriented therapist, Rachael frequently works with dreams as a window to the personal and collective psyche. She has studied advanced dreamwork with Dr Stephen Aizenstat, and teaches dreamwork at several Bay Area psychotherapy training institutes. She is particularly interested in the somatics of dreaming, and in how symbol, metaphor and movement mediate between implicit and explicit memory. Rachael has aten-year dance and authentic movement practice, and she is currently studying Somatic Experiencing.

Rachael also holds a Permaculture Design Certificate and has an active interest in eco-psychology, grounded in gardening, nature art and rural life. She is a member of theShambhala lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.