Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Clinical Psychology Program continues its “Lighthouse Conversations.” These faculty-led talks are designed to address the question: How do we become the people called for by our time?

This year we are adding talks by our graduates and current students.

The series emerges from our commitment to respond to the multiple threats affecting us personally, within our communities, nationally-internationally, and as a species. We recognize that our circumstances are simultaneously external and internal. Global and cultural warfare, climate change, and social injustice threaten our world and communities. Simultaneously, these external burdens match internal crises: increasing rates of depression, anxiety, and PTSD, alongside an epidemic of loneliness as screens replace human connection.

| April 1, April 29, May 27, June 24, July 22, August 12, 2026 |

We gather to talk about this and to help one another find our voice and our contribution.

Each of the clinical program’s faculty, our graduates, and our students are determined to contribute primarily through clinical practice and additionally through our research, scholarship, and lives as citizens. We recognize there are so many good ways of doing this and we start with cultivating belonging.

Pacifica has cultivated belonging through its cohort model for decades. We bring students together in groups that progress through the entire curriculum as a community. We begin by renewing our communal nature. Like mycelia, invisible connections form between staff, students, and faculty. We are cultivating our individual and shared emergent potentials. The whole is greater than its parts.

From the ground of belonging, the program nurtures each student’s unique vision. And we begin by offering our own. Faculty speakers will address the program’s distinctive approach to clinical practice, drawing from our roots in philosophy and the arts, extending into psychoanalytic thought and practice, and finding current expression in relational, emotion – focused, individual and group practice.

These Lighthouse Conversations invite listeners to participate in an emerging vision of psychology that integrates what’s going on in the world with what’s going on with each one of us. These are not separable. We do not divide the individual from the collective, or clinical practice from social transformation. In daunting times, we offer a path toward becoming practitioners, scholars, and citizens capable of meeting the complexities of our times.