How Depth Psychotherapists Help You Access Your Unconscious

Depth psychotherapists help clients bring their unconscious thoughts, motivations, and behaviors into conscious awareness. As Jung famously said,"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."

But how do we make the unconscious conscious? Your therapist may help you begin this process by looking for signs from your unconscious—whether through dreams, imagery, writing, symptoms, relationships, or those strange but meaningful coincidences known as synchronicities.

One particularly powerful technique for accessing the unconscious is active imagination, a method developed by Jung. Unlike free association or meditation, active imagination involves engaging with unconscious material—whether from a dream, an image, or even a piece of art—and allowing it to unfold without judgment. This process creates a dialogue between the conscious and unconscious mind, a dynamic that Jung called the transcendent function.

When we hold both our conscious attitudes and unconscious material in awareness—especially when they seem contradictory—our psyche can respond by generating something new. Depth psychotherapist and author Thomas Moore describes this as the coming together of "mysterious depths of the soul as well as conscious understanding and intention."

Through this process, symbols, mythological motifs, and archetypes often emerge, revealing profound insights about our inner world. In my next post, I’ll explore what archetypes are and why they play such a crucial role in depth psychology.