A Little
Lexicon of
The Soul

Soul

Not just for theologians.

A surprisingly difficult word to define, considering how often we use it.

In depth psychology, soul doesn't necessarily refer to a religious belief or an immortal essence. It can describe the dimension of human experience concerned with meaning, imagination, feeling, beauty, and the mysterious qualities that make life feel deeply lived.

When we speak of tending the soul, we're talking about making room for these experiences rather than treating ourselves as problems to be solved.

Soul is less something we possess and more a way of participating in life.

Psyche

Pronounced SY-khee. Greek for soul.

The whole of our psychological life, including everything we're aware of and everything we're not.

Your thoughts, feelings, memories, dreams, fantasies, instincts, and unconscious patterns all belong to the psyche.

In Jungian psychology, the psyche isn't simply a machine that produces thoughts. It is understood as a living, dynamic system with its own patterns, tensions, and possibilities for development.

And no, your conscious mind isn't necessarily running the whole show.

The Unconscious

The part of you that apparently didn't get the memo.

Much of our psychological life happens outside our conscious awareness.

The unconscious contains forgotten memories, unrecognized feelings, hidden conflicts, and possibilities that have yet to come into awareness. Jung also proposed a collective unconscious, a deeper layer of psychological life containing universal patterns he called archetypes.

We might encounter the unconscious through dreams, emotional reactions, recurring relationship patterns, spontaneous images, or the inexplicable urge to do the very thing we promised ourselves we'd stop doing.

The unconscious isn't necessarily working against us. Sometimes it's attempting to show us something we haven't been willing or able to see.

Depth

There's more beneath the surface.

Depth psychology begins with a deceptively simple proposition: we are not entirely transparent to ourselves.

Beneath our everyday thoughts, behaviors, and identities lies a rich psychological life that influences how we experience the world.

Working with depth means becoming curious about what's underneath our familiar stories and explanations. Rather than focusing exclusively on eliminating a symptom or changing a behavior, we might also wonder what it means, where it comes from, and what it has to tell us.

Sometimes the way forward begins by going a little deeper.

Soma

Greek for body. Yes, the actual body.

Soma refers to the lived, experiencing body, rather than the body understood merely as a collection of anatomical parts.

In somatic psychotherapy, we pay attention to bodily sensations, impulses, movements, tensions, and felt experiences as meaningful aspects of psychological life.

That knot in your stomach, the breath you suddenly find yourself holding, the way your shoulders rise when you speak about your mother? All potentially worth getting curious about.

The body isn't just transporting your psyche from one appointment to the next. It's participating in the conversation.

Shadow

It's not all villains and dark forests.

The shadow consists of aspects of ourselves that we have rejected, denied, hidden, or simply never recognized.

These might include jealousy, rage, selfishness, vulnerability, or desires we find unacceptable. But the shadow can also contain beautiful things: creativity, confidence, sensuality, ambition, and capacities we learned weren't welcome.

Shadow work isn't about becoming a better person by eliminating our darkness.

It's about developing a more honest relationship with the parts of ourselves we'd rather not acknowledge.

Rather inconveniently, these parts tend to announce themselves whether or not we invite them.

Teleology / Telos

Not a telecommunications company.

Telos is a Greek word meaning an end, aim, or purpose. Teleology refers to understanding something in terms of where it might be going, rather than only where it came from.

This is one of the more interesting distinctions in Jungian psychotherapy.

Instead of asking only, "What happened in your past to cause this?" we might also ask, "What might this experience be moving you toward?"

Perhaps a period of dissatisfaction isn't merely something to overcome. Perhaps it's also revealing that an old way of living no longer fits.

This doesn't mean every painful experience happens for a reason, or that suffering is somehow necessary or deserved.

It means we remain curious about what might be emerging through our difficulties, alongside understanding their causes.

Archetypes

The original recurring characters.

Archetypes are universal patterns of human experience that Jung believed belong to the collective unconscious.

Think of the Mother, the Hero, the Trickster, the Wise Old Woman, the Orphan, or the Journey into the Underworld.

These figures appear in myths, fairy tales, religious stories, dreams, and contemporary films because they give recognizable form to experiences humans have grappled with across generations.

An archetype isn't simply a personality type or a character you can assign yourself. It's a deeper pattern that can express itself in countless different ways.

You don't have to believe you're living inside a Greek myth to notice that certain human dramas have been playing out for a very long time.

Individuation

Becoming yourself. Which turns out to be quite a project.

Individuation is the lifelong process of becoming more fully and consciously who we are.

It involves developing a relationship with the many aspects of ourselves, including those that don't fit neatly into our preferred identity.

The goal isn't perfection, self-improvement for its own sake, or becoming entirely independent of other people.

It's wholeness.

As we individuate, we begin to distinguish our authentic values, desires, and ways of being from the expectations we've inherited or absorbed.

There's no graduation ceremony, and nobody hands you a certificate announcing that you've successfully become yourself.

It's an ongoing process of discovery.

Temenos

Pronounced TEM-eh-nos. A sacred space.

In ancient Greece, a temenos was a piece of land set apart for sacred purposes.

In depth psychotherapy, the word describes the protected, intentional space created within the therapeutic relationship.

It's a place where difficult emotions, dreams, questions, memories, and parts of ourselves that rarely have room elsewhere can be explored with care.

The idea isn't that everything inside the temenos will be comfortable. Quite the opposite, sometimes.

But the space is held with enough attention, trust, and respect that meaningful psychological work can take place.

Think less "spa day" and more "a place where you can finally put down your armor."

Complex

We all have them. Yes, even therapists.

A complex is a cluster of emotionally charged memories, associations, beliefs, and feelings organized around a particular theme.

You may have heard someone described as having a "mother complex," "father complex," or "inferiority complex."

While these phrases are often used rather casually, Jung understood complexes as natural features of psychological life that are actually kind of autonomous.

Have you ever found yourself reacting to something with an intensity that seems wildly disproportionate to what's happening? Or felt as though a particular person can instantly turn you back into your thirteen-year-old self?

A complex may have been activated.

Complexes aren't necessarily pathological. But when they operate outside awareness, they can influence our responses, relationships, and choices in ways we don't fully understand.

As Jungian therapists sometimes put it, we don't just have complexes. Complexes can have us.

A Final Word

You don't need to understand any of these concepts to begin psychotherapy.

Depth work isn't an intellectual exercise, and you certainly won't be expected to speak Jungian.

It's a living exploration of your experience, your relationships, your dreams, your body, and the questions that have accompanied you through life.

These words are simply ways of pointing toward things that may already be familiar to you, even if you've never had a name for them.

Sometimes language might help us to find our way, though more often, it is the experiences themselves that have the capacity to transform us.