Unlocking the Unconscious in Depth Therapy
For most of us, life unfolds in the realm of schedules, obligations, and linear thinking. We generally live by a surface current that keeps us moving, often without asking why. Just below that surface lives a deeper, older current: the unconscious. It’s a landscape shaped not by logic, but by image, instinct, emotion, and symbol. These are the raw material of dreams and archetypes. This is where our deepest patterns live, quietly shaping our choices and sense of meaning. Depth psychotherapy invites us to slow down and engage with that quieter voice. Through dreamwork, myth, the natural world, and symbolic imagination, we’re invited into this hidden terrain. The opportunity exists to come into deeper relationship with ourselves.
Dreams: The Royal Road to the Unconscious
Dreams arrive unfiltered, slipping past the gatekeepers of rational thought. They carry the logic of metaphor and the strange poetry of the psyche. They offer symbols that may confound as much as they illuminate. In depth psychotherapy, dreams are approached not as puzzles to be solved. Depth therapists see them as conversations with the unconscious. A crumbling house, a talking fox, or a sudden plunge into water may all hold pieces of a truth the conscious mind hasn’t yet grasped.
Rather than impose fixed meanings, depth therapists explore the dream's emotional tone, personal associations, and recurring motifs. Over time, themes emerge. Dreams begin to trace the contours of a deeper inner landscape. Dream sequences reveal the tensions, desires, and transformations unfolding beneath waking awareness.
Symbols and Images: The Language Beneath Words
The unconscious does not speak in words. It speaks in images, gestures, fragments of sensation. A single image can hold paradox, evoke memory, stir emotion — all at once. Symbols are not signs pointing to a single idea; they are containers of complexity.
The Book of Symbols, a compendium from the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, is one of my favorites for invoking associations from dream symbology. The book is organized by themes such as animals, plants, the human body, and creation. It invites the reader into a contemplative relationship with symbolic imagery. In therapy, working with symbols allows access to layers of meaning that cannot be reached through words alone. They speak to the whole self, not only the thinking mind.
Animals: Instinct, Power, and Inner Guides
Animals that appear in dreams, stories, or active imagination are rarely only animals. They often embody instincts, emotional truths, or qualities we may have disowned. A bear might symbolize protection or solitude. A raven, insight or mischief. A deer, vulnerability and grace. These creatures carry mythic resonance, drawing from the deep well of collective symbolism as well as our personal experience.
I also frequently refer to Elizabeth Caspari’s Animal Life in Nature, Myth and Dreams in my depth psychotherapy practice. This book delves into the psychological significance of animals as symbols in the unconscious. Drawing from art and mythology, Caspari shows how animals can appear as messengers or guardians in dreamlife. Each entry brings attention to parts of the psyche that want to be known. Working with these figures often leads to surprising emotional shifts and a renewed connection with our instinctual nature.
Nature: The Mirror and the Medicine
There is a kind of knowing that only comes from being in relationship with the more-than-human world. Trees, rivers, stones, and storms have long held symbolic meaning in myth and ritual. In therapy, natural imagery often appears spontaneously in dreams or inner vision. A tangled forest may represent confusion or descent. A mountain peak, perspective or isolation. The four elements — earth, water, fire, air — each offer their own language. Water may reflect emotion and unconscious depth. Fire may represent transformation or anger.
By paying attention to how nature shows up in the psyche, we return to an older, more embodied way of understanding ourselves. Nature mirrors the rhythms of growth, decay, stillness, and renewal that also shape our inner lives.
Myth and Archetype: Finding Ourselves in Old Stories
Stories that have endured for millennia didn’t only survive because they were entertaining. They survived because they spoke to something timeless in us. Myths are more than cultural relics; they’re psychological maps. Jung called them archetypal expressions. Archetypes are core patterns of human experience that live deep in the psyche. Whether we realize it or not, we move through these mythic motifs in our own lives. Descent and return. Sacrifice and rebirth. Exile and homecoming. When we engage with myth in depth psychotherapy, we are encountering parts of ourselves in symbolic form.
Take the story of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess who descends into the underworld. She is stripped of her power at each gate. Her journey speaks to periods of inner breakdown and surrender when all the usual markers of identity fall away. It’s a myth of transformation, not through conquest, but through loss and renewal.
Or the Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu, who retreats into a cave out of grief and shame, leaving the world in darkness. Only when the other gods create a mirror and a joyful commotion outside does she emerge again. Her story mirrors the healing process after withdrawal. It shows how reflection, recognition, and community help draw the hidden self back into the light.
In Norse mythology, the god Tyr sacrifices his hand to the great wolf Fenrir. He does this to uphold an agreement that sustains cosmic balance. His myth speaks to the human experience of conscious sacrifice. It is by giving something up that we stay in right relationship with a deeper truth.
These myths are ancient stories that live in us. They give shape and context to the psychological initiations we all face. In depth therapy, they help hold what feels unbearable. They show us that what we are moving through is not only personal, but profoundly human.
Listening to the Deep Self
Depth psychotherapy does not aim to "fix" the unconscious. It invites us into relationship with it. Through dreams, symbols, nature, myth, and imagination, we approach the mystery within us. We aren't aiming to conquer it, but rather to collaborate with it.
This is slow work. It is cyclical, poetic, often nonlinear. In learning the language of the unconscious, we become more fully ourselves. We grow roots and awareness. We have conversation with the inner world that has been speaking to us for longer than we’ve known.
Find Support With Depth Psychotherapy in Pasadena, CA
Are you struggling to understand why certain patterns seem to haunt your life? Depth psychotherapy can help you access the deeper parts of yourself often overlooked in talk therapy alone. With the help of Rezak Therapy, you can move into a more intentional and meaningful life. Follow these three simple steps to get started:
Schedule a free 15-minute consultation to see if Depth Therapy is right for you.
Begin meeting with a skilled depth therapist.
Start making sense of the symbols, animals, and images that come to you in dreams.
Other Services Offered at Rezak Therapy in Pasadena, CA
At Rezak Therapy, we're here to help you align with your most authentic self. In addition to accessing your unconscious self with depth therapy, our holistic therapy approaches also include talk therapy and somatic therapy. We offer individual therapy for those suffering from anxiety, Couples therapy for partnerships looking to improve communication in their relationships, and a Women’s Intimacy Group which is sacred circle for women to grow together in community. For more on depth therapy and our other services check out our blog.
