Betsy Perluss, Ph.D.

02/10/2026

The Poetics of Psychotherapy: How does language create & define mental illness?

Virginia Woolf wrote tht we suffer from a "poverty of language" when we're in pain. Therapists must help patients to discover a "poetics of suffering" to express their afflictions.

05/23/2025

“Healing practices map distressing experiences and afflictions onto metaphoric representations drawn from culturally authorized narratives and ontologies,” offering possibilities for transformation through “ritual practices or metaphoric reframing.”

Far from cultural add-ons, these traditions reveal how Western psychology’s assumptions about mind, health, and healing may be too narrow to serve a diverse world.

03/22/2025

Dear Friends, I am pleased to announce the completion of my revised webpage. Please take a look and if you feel inclined, sign up for my occasional newsletter. Next step is updating the blog. A big thanks to Andrea Palframan (https://andreapalframan.com) for her artistic flare and patience. You can find me at https://betsyperluss.com

“The Privilege of a Lifetime is to Become Who You Really Are.” – C.G. Jung Jungian Analyst & Wilderness Guide Are you committed to a journey of self-discovery? I will guide you through Jungian psychotherapy, grounded in Earth-centered and embodied practices. Exploring individuation, dreamwork,...

05/31/2024

Unrecognized trauma perpetuates trauma. Therapy is political.

"Rather than use the term “post-traumatic stress disorder,” many have called to reframe the view of such suffering. Some have called it chronic traumatic stress disorder, and others, including Palestinian scholars, have referred to it as feeling broken or destroyed. This is not just a matter of semantics. These alternatives show that it is not enough to offer therapeutic options that place the abnormality within individuals and not within the circumstances they are experiencing. Is it not actually quite normal and understandable to feel broken or destroyed when everything you have ever known is reduced to rubble?"

What Palestinians have been experiencing is beyond the framework of today’s mental health care.

04/29/2024

Arrived in Barcelona to help launch our first European Month Long Training. Thank you Diana and Xavi for hosting us and for all your hard and beautiful work at https://www.transalquimia.org/spain-month-long-training. After this year, Diana and Xavi will carry the Month-Long forward in the European bioregion of Northern Spain, making this training available to those closer to home. This dream started during the Covid lockdown, and is now coming to fruition.