Dissertation Title:
Our Inner Healing Intelligence: The Self Archetype and Soul Retrieval
Candidate:
Manuel Dominguez
Date, Time & Place:
March 13, 2026 at 2:00 pm
Virtual
Abstract
This dissertation is a ceremonial journey into the mystery of the Inner Healing Intelligence���a force known to Jung as the Self and to Indigenous traditions as the soul���s innate will to return to wholeness. Bridging the mythic pathways of depth psychology and the ancestral rituals of Indigenous soul retrieval, this work traces how entheogens open portals into non-ordinary reality where healing becomes possible. Through a hybrid methodology that treats research as ceremony and knowledge as relational, this inquiry moves in spirals���not lines���through dreams, symbols, ritual, and story. A talking circle of voices���human, archetypal, and ancestral���gathers around shared themes of fragmentation and return, the unseen and the symbolic, the sacred and the psychological. The Default Mode Network becomes a gatekeeper of ego, while plant medicines dissolve the veil, revealing the Self not as an idea, but as a presence. This is not simply a dissertation���it is a rite of return. My own healing path is woven through the text as living testimony. In honoring Indigenous ways of knowing, this dissertation becomes an offering: a map toward wholeness, where psyche meets Spirit, and ceremony becomes the language of reconciliation between the colonized mind and remembering soul.
- Program/Track/Year: Depth Psychology with Specialization in Integrative Therapy and Healing Practices, H, 2019
- Chair: Dr. Elizabeth Nelson
- Reader: Dr. Gina Belton
- External Reader: Dr. Raksmey Tiano
- Keywords: Inner Healing Intelligence, Self Archetype, Soul Retrieval, Entheogens, Default Mode Network
