ISAP AnalytikerInnen in Ausbildung

I came to analytical psychology sideways. I spent more than a decade as a veterinarian — in clinics, in rescue, and finally in end-of-life care, going into people’s homes at the hardest moments of their lives. What began as a love of animals became a love of the people the animals brought me to, and taught me to be present at thresholds: birth, sickness, death, and the grief our culture leaves so little room for.

A long reckoning with my own health later turned me toward the body and toward somatic work, alongside a Sufi practice I still hold. But I didn’t come to Jung through psychology — I came to him through a period of deep burnout, when I began dreaming again, vividly and mythically, for the first time since childhood. In my own analysis I recognized the same systems-thinking I’d always brought to animals and the people who loved them, now turned inward. That recognition led me to ISAPZURICH.

My training is in classical Jungian analysis, and my deepest aim is to stay present with what is actually here — beginning with dreams, moving into active imagination and the body, and trusting that the deeper patterns will show themselves in their own time. The animals are still here too; they come to me, and to those I work with, in dreams and waking life alike.

A fuller story, and more about how I work, is at lauradarlene.ch

“Because they are so closely akin to us and share our unknowingness, I loved all warm-blooded animals who have souls like ourselves and with whom, so I thought, we have an instinctive understanding. We experience joy and sorrow, love and hate, hunger and thirst, fear and trust in common…”
— C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Languages spoken: English