Satya is a Portland-based psychotherapist specializing in Jungian therapy for 20 and 30-somethings. She received her masters degree from Pacifica Graduate Institute, a school founded in the tradition of depth psychology, and home to the libraries of the late Joseph Campbell and James Hillman. She completed her graduate thesis on the modern epidemic of the “quarter-life crisis” and its relation to cultural fragmentation, tracing its similarities to the mid-life crisis as Carl Gustav Jung postulated it, as well as to the absence of ritual rites of passage for people coming of age today.
Satya’s interest in the work of Jung started when she was in her early twenties. After graduating from Lewis and Clark College with a degree in history, and completing her thesis on the evolution of non-violent resistance in the lives of Gandhi and Mandela, she worked for several months in both Colombia and Sri Lanka within the arenas of social justice and humanitarian aid. On returning to Portland, she felt motivated by her varied experiences with poverty and violence abroad to find a direction in her professional life that combined care of the world with care of the soul. In her experiences, on-the-ground pragmatic solutions and social activism alone did not seem to be achieving the peace and equality that the world is seeking. It was during this time that she read Jung’s memoir and discovered that all of the seemingly unrelated things she cared about—history, physics, racism, war, peace, violence, dreams, symbols, people—were found in one book. Soon she had joined a local dream group and had entered Jungian analysis. Shortly thereafter, she began a graduate program to study Jungian psychology herself.
After completing graduate school, Satya joined the very small staff of The Philemon Foundation, an academic foundation that exists to publish Jung’s unpublished archives, and which midwifed the illustrious Red Book from a Swiss bank vault to bookshelves around the world. Today she is an occasional consultant on the forthcoming Red Book documentary film.
Satya’s article on Jungian psychology for the first half of life was published in the academic journal Psychological Perspectives. Other writing has appeared in Oregon Humanities Magazine, The Hairpin, and the Utne Reader. Her essay “Gone Astray” was listed as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays, 2015.
Satya’s Delve seminar, “The Unification of the Opposites: The Works of Carl Jung,” will cover a series of Jung’s essays written throughout his career. The goal of the seminar will be to de-mystify a variety of his concepts as well as understand their application to modern life; from the renewed focus on race in America and the polarizing debate about gun violence, to the value of intimate relationship for psychological growth, this seminar will explore how the opposites of our dualistic universe affect all of us and how individual consciousness contributes to collective consciousness and social evolution.
This will be Satya’s third season as a Delve guide with Literary Arts. Her private practice, Quarter-Life Counseling, can be found at quarterlifecounselor.com
