- Jun 23 2026
- 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Local Time
- Timezone: Europe/Amsterdam
- Date: Jun 23 2026
- Time: 9:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Speaker
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Drew Smith
- Online
Eranos events (independently added) and Dream Tending (pending approval to add). Alumni Events don't seem relevant.
Designing a Soul-Centered Vocation in a Split World: Refusing the Either/Or
June 23 & 30, 2026, Two Online sessions with Dr. Drew Smith
What does one do with a degree in depth psychology?
In a culture organized around efficiency, specialization, and measurable productivity, depth psychology can be difficult to situate. It resists easy categorization. It does not conform neatly to prevailing clinical, behavioral, or neurological frameworks. Its language is symbolic rather than technical, its outcomes qualitative rather than easily quantified. As a result, it is often misunderstood.
Yet it is precisely this marginal position that gives depth psychology its power. Because it stands slightly outside dominant paradigms, it can see what they cannot. It attends to the unconscious dynamics shaping individuals and systems. It asks questions that disrupt reductionism. It insists that soul, meaning, and symbolic life are not luxuries, but foundations.
Dr. Drew’s path into depth psychology was anything but direct. Before graduate school, he spent fifteen years on the road in a performance ensemble, crafting and staging work that challenged theological orthodoxies and invited audiences into deeper questioning. The stage became a laboratory for symbolic thinking and cultural critique — an apprenticeship in holding the tension and trusting that transformation often begins with challenging narratives.
In hindsight, those years were not a detour but a formation. They cultivated the capacities depth psychology requires: symbolic literacy, comfort with ambiguity, and the courage to hold tension without rushing toward resolution.
In the session on June 23rd, Dr. Drew reflects on designing a vocation that refuses the either/or. Rather than choosing between business and soul, scholarship and application, performance and pedagogy, he explores what it means to carry a depth-psychological lens into spaces where it has traditionally not belonged.
Drawing from his work in organizational resilience, leadership education, and mythopoetic scholarship, Dr. Drew argues that depth psychology is not merely a profession — it is a way of seeing. When this perspective is brought into classrooms, boardrooms, and cultural conversations, it exposes unconscious dynamics shaping collective life. It interrupts reductionism and complicates simplistic narratives. It introduces soul into systems that rarely acknowledge it.
Using the metaphor of the labyrinth, he describes a vocational journey marked by unexpected turns that appear to move away from the center rather than toward it. Yet each turn carries its own invitation to see differently. The pressure to “arrive” softens into trust. Linear ambition yields to more surrender and less striving. Like an oak leaf borne along a current, trusting that even the turns and eddies will carry you toward where you are designed to be.
This session invites participants to reconsider vocation not as employment, but as a transformational calling — an alchemical process in which the question shifts from “Where do I fit?” to “Who am I becoming?”
For those navigating unconventional paths, delayed beginnings, or interdisciplinary callings, this conversation offers not a blueprint, but a way of trusting: the labyrinth may twist away from the center, but if you keep walking — one foot in front of the other — depth will meet you wherever you find yourself.
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