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What is Depth Psychotherapy?
Rather than focusing solely on symptom reduction or practical solutions, psychotherapy sessions with me offer a space in which thoughts, feelings, images, and patterns can be explored over time. It is a way of working that values reflection, imagination, and the gradual unfolding of meaning.
aphillipsarts
Mar 246 min read


Winnicott: Playing and Reality, and Frankel: The Adolescent Psyche
What does it mean to play in psychotherapy? And what does it mean to become, especially in adolescence? Two books that have shaped my clinical thinking in profound ways are D.W. Winnicott’s Playing and Reality and Richard Frankel’s The Adolescent Psyche. Though written in different contexts, both works invite us to reconsider how we understand psychological growth, creativity, and transformation. At their heart is a shared concern with something alive in the psyche: the space
aphillipsarts
Feb 115 min read


50th Anniversary of Re-Visioning Psychology by James Hillman
Fifty years after James Hillman published Re Visioning Psychology, his work remains vivid, challenging, and creatively alive. This article explores Hillman’s life, ideas, and contributions to archetypal psychology, with reflections on image, soul, dreams, imagination, and the deep ecological and cultural themes that shaped his vision.
aphillipsarts
Dec 5, 202513 min read


Psychotherapy for Artists and Creatives
Art Psychotherapy for Creatives offers a supportive and imaginative space for artists, writers, musicians and performers who want to explore their inner life, creative blocks and emotional wellbeing. Working online across the UK, I provide depth oriented therapy that helps you reconnect with meaning, expression and creative confidence in a safe, reflective space.
aphillipsarts
Nov 28, 20257 min read


Feeling Unsure About Starting Therapy
The fact that you know I am here to accept you just as you are, and listen carefully to whatever you tell me, doesn't mean I expect talking about your life to feel easy. It is usually not the case that a person in therapy feels they can simply 'tell me anything' at the beginning, in fact it is often not advisable to dive in too quickly. If something is difficult to talk about, we might turn our attention from the 'thing' or 'subject' you are trying to describe, towards why it
aphillipsarts
Nov 19, 202525 min read


Astrology and Depth Psychology: Finding Meaning in the Heavens
A personal reflection on how astrology and depth psychology meet within the shared language of symbolism, offering new ways to understand psyche, relationship, and meaning.
aphillipsarts
Nov 10, 20254 min read


The North Remembers - Art and Embodied Imagination | An essay by Keith Hackwood
Different landscapes in our sense of the world also speak to us differently, and here it serves us to consider the aspect of ‘North’ in Phillips’s work. Made on and of the chalklands of England’s South Downs, then nurtured and moulded in art school in South Wales (where his dissertation for his degree in Fine Art provides us with another clue - ‘Remedy in the Affliction: Beginning with the Wound’) the intervening years have slowly led the artist Northwards.
aphillipsarts
Jul 14, 202513 min read


A Robert Romanyshyn Workshop, Orpheus, and the Thunderclap
What struck me most during the workshop, and what I have since revisited in reading his work, is Romanyshyn’s ability to remain faithful to both scholarship and soul. He does not reduce myth to symbol, or psychology to a set of tools or techniques. Instead, he invites us into a relationship with psyche, with image, with story.
aphillipsarts
Jun 23, 20257 min read


Spiritual Ecology and Psychotherapy: Listening to the Earth
What does it mean to listen to the Earth? Not as a metaphor, but as an act of reverent attention. For those whose work engages with psyche and image (particularly psychotherapists and artists in this instance) the question can evoke something ancestral, a realignment of the senses with our most natural way of being in the world. We are accustomed to listening deeply: to silences, the symbolic, to psyche speaking through image and metaphor. So what happens when we turn this sa
aphillipsarts
Jun 13, 20257 min read


Patrick Harpur and the imagination: The Philosophers' Secret Fire
Patrick Harpur's The Philosopher's Secret Fire explores a forgotten understanding of imagination. Not fantasy or invention, but a living realm where myth, psyche, and world meet. This article reflects on imagination in psychotherapy, creative practice, and the imaginal dimension of reality.
aphillipsarts
May 13, 20257 min read


Alchemy & Mysticism: A Journey Through Art
There are certain books that feel less like something to be read from beginning to end, and more like something to return to, to open at any page and enter a particular world. Alchemy & Mysticism is one of those. I have returned to this Taschen volume many times. Each encounter offers something slightly different, not only in what is seen, but in how the images seem to work upon the imagination. The Opus as Image What strikes me most in these pages is that even where the mate
aphillipsarts
Apr 24, 20253 min read


Symbolic Imagination: Warren Colman and the Emergence of Archetypes
An exploration of material becoming living presence in the art object. Jungian analyst Warren Colman explores the formation of archetypes as derived from human engagement with their social and material environment. This is a phenomenological approach which sees psychic life as emergent from embodied action in the world, in contrast to a classical Jungian perspective which would view archetypes as pre-existent, either “inborn” biologically, or metaphysically a priori. As I und
aphillipsarts
Apr 23, 20255 min read


"James Hillman: An Artist of Psychology."
The work of James Hillman can feel both compelling and difficult to approach. His writing does not sit easily within conventional ideas of psychology, and often asks something different of the reader. Less a system to be understood, and more a way of seeing to be entered into. This copy of A Blue Fire has been with me for the best part of twenty years. It was one of the first ‘psychology’ books I owned, and it has lived a life. The cover is worn, the pages marked by time and
aphillipsarts
Apr 10, 20253 min read


Carl Jung on the Permeability of Psyche: Nature, Ancestry and the Living World
Carl Jung’s reflections from Bollingen reveal a psyche that is not confined to the individual but flows through nature, ancestry, and the deep roots of life. This expanded post explores Jung’s vision of the interconnectedness of self, soul, and the living world.
aphillipsarts
Apr 9, 20256 min read


The Wisdom of Not Knowing: Carl Jung and the Soul of Therapy
The First Encounter I discovered the work of Carl Jung during my mid-to-late teens, when I plucked this text from a shelf in a local bookshop. Having no idea at the time who this man was, or about psychoanalysis, I imagine I was attracted by the title. A Timely Passage in a Culture of Speed I find the following passage especially fascinating today, in a world where we are so often required to ‘know’ quickly. Alluding to a way of working that seeks not to impinge upon the...
aphillipsarts
Apr 9, 20256 min read
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