Sketches for the Recovery of Night Vision: Re-Orienting Depth Psychology to Engage the Inconvenient Truths of

The challenge of the inconvenient Altman (2004) describes psychoanalysis ’ “night vision ” as its precious ability to critique society and to probe its intrapsychic implications from the position of an outsider and critic. Such vision allows us to begin to see what of our psychological suffering is linked with the culture(s) in which we reside. Such vision is required to create processes of needed healing and what Lorenz has called “creative restoration ” at the individual, community, intercommunity, and human/environment levels of organization (Lorenz & Watkins, 2003). In this dark time, we need such night vision. Why is it in such short supply in depth psychologies, be they psychoanalytic, Jungian, or phenomenological? How could we re-orient our teaching, training, studying, theorizing, and practicing of depth psychology to regain and strengthen it? I speak of depth psychologies in the plural because this more accurately describes the plurality of psychoanalytic, Jungian, and phenomenological approaches that have evolved. To address these questions we enter the realm of inconvenient truths, the topic of this volume. Convenient truths can be assimilated into our pre-existing understandings o