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Our Vision
The Gothic Psyche School of Thought reclaims the Gothic not as a genre, but as a psychological and symbolic system, a language capable of articulating what contemporary culture struggles to hold: death, grief, trauma, maternal ambivalence, neurodivergence, liminality, and the metaphysical dimensions of human experience.
We argue that the Gothic is not merely literary. It is archetypal. It emerges wherever the psyche confronts rupture, transition, and the unknown.
Our vision is to restore the symbolic, embodied, and metaphysical dimensions of psychological life, dimensions increasingly marginalised in a culture that privileges productivity, visibility, and emotional sanitisation over depth.
Here, darkness is not pathology.
Descent is not collapse.
The uncanny is not an error.
They are thresholds.
The Great Mother as Psychic Container
At the centre of this vision stands the archetype of the Great Mother, not romanticised, but understood in her full symbolic polarity: generative and devouring, protective and overwhelming.
Through research into Gothic artistic productions, from 18th-century literature to contemporary works such as Dark, we explore how the Great Mother functions as a psychic container in times of collective crisis, grief, and transformation.
The Gothic becomes the space where this container can be examined, inhabited, and symbolically integrated.
The mission of the School is to:
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Conduct research at the intersection of depth psychology, Gothic literature and artistic productions, archetypal theory, and symbolic philosophy.
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Publish essays and cultural analysis in English and Spanish.
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Develop frameworks for symbolic mapping, dreamwork, and archetypal reflection.
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Offer an alternative to reductionist educational and psychological models that silence discomfort and exile metaphysical inquiry.
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Build a community for those who recognise in marginality, suffering, and the uncanny not pathology, but meaning.
Mission
As psychology entered the 20th century, experimental methods and behaviourism narrowed its field to what could be measured and observed. The symbolic imagination, dreams, archetypes, and metaphysical questions were increasingly sidelined.
Simultaneously, Gothic literature, emerging in the 18th century with works like The Castle of Otranto, and developing through writers such as Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, or Bram Stoker, was relegated to the realm of the sensational or excessive.
Yet Gothic narratives were already dramatising trauma, repression, death, and archetypal conflict long before these concepts were formalised in psychoanalysis.
When depth psychology named the unconscious, projection, and archetypes, it gave theoretical language to what Gothic symbolism had embodied for over a century.
The Gothic was never peripheral.
It was diagnostic.
Why Gothic Psychology? The Missing Link
Closing Invitation
The Gothic Psyche School of Thought does not treat the Gothic as entertainment, nor psychology as diagnosis.
It proposes a third space:
a rigorous, symbolic, and culturally engaged framework for exploring grief, death, transition, motherhood in its shadow forms, and collective crises.
This is a return to a lineage where symbol precedes system, and where descent is understood as initiation.
If you sense that ordinary language cannot contain your experience, or that your suffering resists simplification, this is your place.
Knowledge lies in the descent.
