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- Creator:
- Shahrokhshahi, Rita
- Description:
- Purpose of the Study: This thesis examines the patriarchal wounding of my Slavic mother line and follows the healing journey I took to transform wounds to enrich my self-identity in my pursuit toward wholeness Procedure: My study follows the motherline. The motherline is the maternal lineage of a woman backward through the generations. I explored the wounding of my motherline by using an autoethnographical narrative. Autoethnography is an autobiographical form of qualitative research that uses self reflection to explore personal stories and experiences within a cultural context. I used self-reflection to aid my stories and employed a Jungian psychological framework. Through the myth of Inanna, I embarked upon a metaphorical descent and met the dark goddess Ereshkigal. I relied on depth techniques to track and interpret my dreams, guide my active imaginations, and create spontaneous healing rituals. I made a pilgrimage to Montenegro to further assist my inquiries and overall depth experience. Findings: I found that healing occurs in the reflective process of sharing my journey of personal and cultural wounding. Healing is not a means to an end but is rather an ongoing process toward a quest to achieve wholeness. I found that my personal female individuation process is a continuous stream of engaging with the rhythms of life, death, and rebirth as a continuous cycle in my developmental pattern. My mother line wounds provided deep layers of meaningful experiences to happen that continue to offer value for me to expand my quest toward wholeness. Conclusions: Suffering from personal wounds affords the opportunity to examine the soul through a process of individuation. The connection with the motherline and one's cultural lineage is a way to further understand self and create wholeness. For women, the sacred feminine is a source for greater meaning. In the quest toward female individuation, a goddess-centered spirituality is an opening to assist the exploration of vast realms and qualities that lives inside every woman.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- Psychology
- Creator:
- Radclyffe, Renee C.
- Description:
- Purpose of the Study: This study is an attempt to validate the importance of integrating women's issues into traditional psychology classes at a college level. Psychology, for the most part, had ignored, trivialized, and/or negated women's life experiences. All too often women are viewed as mentally unhealthy or incapable of maturing fully because of the standards set by society and by those in the psychological profession. Because of such stereotypical sex-role attitudes, it is most important to examine why such attitudes exist and to examine their origins. Procedure: I have researched two areas of female psychology: first, Freudian and feminist psychology, and second, looking at women psychologists whose contributions to the development of modern psychology have been deleted from current psychology textbooks. In part one, using literature primarily from feminist books, I chose to explore several of Sigmund Freud's concepts on female sexuality: penis envy, masochism, vaginal versus clitorial orgasm because such concepts appear to be, in part, correlated with the oppression of women. I have also commented on other Freudian theorists, and others who "broke away" from Freud's circle. In part two, I have reviewed psychology textbooks to confirm the absence of women and their contributions and have researched other feminist books to find the history of women psychologists. Findings and Conclusions: With the development of modern psychology, an attitude surfaced that still exists today, and that is that mentally healthy women are those who adhere to sex-role expectations in our society. Freud, for example, once described feminists as women who had a desire to be men. I have often heard men comment that feminists are trying to be like men or that they are dykes or castrating bitches. Because of feminist therapy, many women are challenging such attitudes by learning to understand social conditioning rather than by internalizing such conditioning that has made women feel inferior and mentally unhealthy. As students of psychology, men and women have been taught that women have not been influential in the development of modern psychology. Current textbooks in the history of psychology ignore or trivialize women's contributions. Through extensive and exhausting research, I was able to find information about many women psychologists who have now been deleted from textbooks. The integration of such information is vital to the education of today's students. While women's studies classes have attempted to fill this void, many male students and instructors believe such classes are not pertinent. this research project argues that, until textbooks are revised to include the female half of psychology, it is essential that instructors take the time to find material on women psychologists and on more positive images of female psychology and incorporate it into their lectures and reading materials.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- Psychology
- Creator:
- Farris, Al’Lisha
- Description:
- Throughout my life, growing up as an African American, I desired to gain answers to where my ancestors came from. The purpose of this self-study is to explore the role ancestry and the collective unconscious may have played in answering my question of ancestry. I explore the appearance of themes and imagery in dreams and artwork, paired with depth processing methods in order to determine if the unconscious has worked to bring an intuitive connection between myself and my ancestral origins, as revealed through my ancestry test results. This work is a representation of my journey of ancestral revelation and the role of the collective unconscious in self-discovery and reconnection with my soul. My findings reveal a connection between the archetypal symbols of the serpent, the golden orb, the Sankofa and my ancestral connection to Ghana.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- Psychology

- Creator:
- Constantino, Michael
- Description:
- Purpose of the Study: This thesis explores human evolution from a holistic, transpersonal, and psychospiritual perspective in attempt to answer a central question: What is necessary to restoring humanity’s relationship to nature amid our current ecological crisis? Humanity’s loss of interdependence with nature is examined within a context of trauma and an indigenous equivalent of soul loss at the individual, collective, planetary, and cosmic levels. Methods: This study utilizes peer-reviewed literature and triangulation from Jungian, indigenous, and transpersonal psychologies, which, as theoretical disciplines, offer insights that illustrate the importance of engagement with the sacred via the soul. An interdisciplinary approach is also used – drawing from the integral philosophy of Jean Gebser (1966/1986); the historical and cultural critique of Morris Berman (1981/1989); the mystery tradition of alchemy; somatic-based trauma literature; and contrasting views of traditional and contemporary science. Research methods of triangulation, reflexivity, phenomenology, and radical empiricism are used as means of measuring validity. Findings: Humanity’s lack of response to the ecological crisis may be the result of unrecognized individual and collective trauma, signified by a deepening separation from nature, loss of feeling, and symptoms of dissociation. These can be defined as traumatic conditions. When examined from an integral and psychospiritual perspective their interdependence and unconscious and transpersonal nature can be uncovered. Conclusions: This study sheds light on three areas: (1) the importance of psychospiritual and holistic considerations in human evolution, (2) a reexamination into the causes and remedies of our current ecological crisis, and (3) a reevaluation of the relevance of the psychospiritual interface, the interplay between psychological and spiritual phenomena and their involvement in the evolutionary process. The transpersonal and psychospiritual fields are often marginalized as unscientific but may be more relevant to true scientific inquiry than previously thought.
- Resource Type:
- Masters Thesis
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- Psychology

- Creator:
- Sullins, John P.
- Description:
- Artificial Life (ALife) has two goals. One attempts to describe fundamental qualities of living systems through agent based computer models. And the second studies whether or not we can artificially create living things in computational mediums that can be realized either virtually in software or through biotechnology. The study of ALife has recently branched into two further subdivisions, one is ‘dry’ ALife, which is the study of living systems ‘in silico’ through the use of computer simulations, and the other is ‘wet’ ALife that uses biological material to realize what has only been simulated on computers; effectively wet ALife uses biological material as a kind of computer. This is challenging to the field of computer ethics as it points towards a future in which computer and bioethics might have shared concerns. The emerging studies into wet ALife are likely to provide strong empirical evidence for A Life’s most challenging hypothesis: that life is a certain set of computable functions that can be duplicated in any medium. I believe this will propel ALife into the midst of the mother of all cultural battles that has been gathering around the emergence of biotechnology. Philosophers need to pay close attention to this debate and can serve a vital role in clarifying and resolving the dispute. But even if Life is merely a computer modeling technique that sheds light on living systems, it still has a number of significant ethical implications such as its use in the modeling of moral and ethical systems, as well as in the creation of artificial moral agents.
- Resource Type:
- Article
- Identifier:
- 1388-1957
- Campus Tesim:
- Sonoma
- Department:
- Psychology