What Depth Psychology Can Teach Us About Vocation and Why it Matters with Dr. Jennifer Selig

Jennifer Leigh Selig, Ph.D. is core faculty in Pacifica's Jungian & Archetypal specialization of the M.A./Ph.D. Depth Psychology program. Dr. Selig teaches numerous courses at Pacifica, is the author of several books, and contributes regularly to the Pacifica Post Blog. Her books include Thinking Outside the Church: 110 Ways to Connect With Your Spiritual Nature; Reimagining Education: Essays on Retrieving the Soul of Learning; The Soul Does Not Specialize: Revaluing the Humanities and the Polyvalent Imagination which she coedited with Dr. Dennis Slattery, a Mythological Studies professor at Pacifica; and Integration: The Psychology and Mythology of Martin Luther King, Jr. and His (Unfinished) Therapy With the Soul of America. Her website is www.jenniferleighselig.com.

[@donloristo3653]

Thank you, Jennifer. Your presentation is confirmation for me that Pacifica is the next step on my journey.

[@mhrandolph]

What a beautiful presentation, Jennifer. Thank you for reminding me of my archetypal star.

[@fabiusso84]

This is such a fantastic presentation. Thank you.

[@laurabruch6981]

Hi Dr. Selig. Because I know you and Pacifica so well, I super loved your presentation and knew a whole lot of context to your presentation. Brilliant weaving of historical and mythological context as well as artistic and scholarly considerations. Your love of Mary Oliver and MLK Jr especially resonated with me. The star analogy was a new one for me! Loved it, and the freedom to create a flower metaphor or whatever fits the student-creator of the deeper archetypal understandings and potentially liminal spaces of the shadow archetypes that must dance with the alchemical spacetime in which the person and their soul is situated. Whew quite the sentence... I get the weave! Love you! Laura Bruch

[@xxjeannexx]

Absolutely love this - thank you for posting!

[@davester3090]

I’m sorry but I was hoping for so much more. Not that it wasn’t a thoughtful presentation but I was hoping it was going to address the millions of people who have lost our way in finding our vocation and if there is any hope finding it in the later stages of life

[@hypatia4754]

That would have been relevant to a lot of us.

[@elizabethmansfield3609]

But she did address this very point! Look at what you did that was weird as a child…

[@theflittingbutterfly]

I too used to play the role of a teacher, had a balckboard and chalk, used to create attendance register on my own, carried my academic books, big ruler, purse in hands and had my imaginary students sitting infront of me. Teaching comes like a pro to me. I dont know if it is my vocation because I was fond of it in childhood and less fond of it now. I pray that i get to know my vocation soon as am struggling and suffering a lot in finding one.

[@bearrnabas]

This was wonderful! Thank you!

[@makkusuXmax]

how can someone who has only done one job there whole life payed by the government too have a clue about vocation? she's very confident too. wow. Do at least 5 different jobs in different vocations for at least 2 years in each and then do some research and let us know your findings. Hi kids I know all about vocations I've read many books about it....

[@benjamingeorgecoles8060]

I think I agree with some of the bigger points here, but the method of argument bothers me intensely, particularly when it comes to the Hillman claim about us all having our vocations there in us and expressed even as children. It's shocking to me that, in a serious academic context, an argument can rely on almost exclusively cherry-picked anecdotal evidence (MLK was, in many ways, not at all typical!), and not even acknowledge the limitations of that. I wonder what Selig or Hillman would say about all those who have no particular consuming passion in childhood - I wonder whether they'd deny such people really exist. And I wonder what they'd say about me, as I have several senses of vocation now, none of which have very much to do with anything I was preoccupied with in childhood. (I feel they'd condescendingly tell me I misinterpret my own childhood, and the signs are there somewhere.) What's more, I wish she'd taken a moment to consider how we can so easily end up falsely insisting to ourselves and others that we have some very important vocation that we were born to pursue, even when, truth be told, we don't much enjoy the activities central to that vocation, and we've just been successfully sold a particular vocation-based image of ourself by the culture or particular people surrounding us. And then maybe we do or maybe we don't learn to enjoy those activities in time, and so maybe it does or maybe it doesn't become a real vocation for us. Generally, on this subject, I found myself a lot more in agreement with the TEDx talk Stop Searching for Your Passion by Terri Trespicio - in any case worth watching as a good counterweight to this lecture.