In all models of the journey archetype, one of the stages is the descent into the underworld, an initiation into the dark night of the soul. It’s an inevitable stage of life, one we enter many times over the course of a well-lived life. Jung certainly knew the underworld well, exploring it in his chapter, “Confrontation with the Unconscious,” in Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

This presentation explores the psychological topography of the underworld and offers a map we can read to help us understand our journey. I will offer seven stages, seven “stations of the cross,” if you will, that we’re likely to visit during our time down under. I’ll introduce each stage with a myth and then show how it manifests in our contemporary journeys, using popular memoirs as examples. Participants will then map their own underworld journey onto the stages.

This course will provide a model that therapists and coaches can use with their clients; clergy and lay ministers can use with their congregants; and friends and family can use with their beloveds in order to understand and support their underworld journey. It’s useful for creatives too—for example, fiction and film writers can use it to imagine rich underworld journeys; songwriters can use it to create songs of the stages; and memoir writers can use it to name and frame their own time in the underworld. All of us can use it to more deeply understand, appreciate, and perhaps even elevate our time in the underworld.

Jennifer Leigh Selig, Ph.D., is a lifelong educator with 35 years of classroom experience, teaching in the fields of literature, psychology, creativity studies, and the humanities. She taught at Pacifica Graduate Institute for many of those years where she was the founding chair of the Jungian and Archetypal Studies doctoral program. Her presentation is based on a chapter from her latest book, Deep Memoir: An Archetypal Approach to Deepen Your Story and Broaden Its Appeal.