Barbara Holifield

Barbara Holifield, MSW, LMFT, SEP, is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. With over forty years of clinical practice in depth psychotherapy and somatic healing — and her certification as a Jungian Analyst since 2006 — her work lives at the intersection of Jung and the body, bringing together somatic experiencing, affective neuroscience, relational psychoanalysis, and the wisdom of the bodily-felt sense to offer a path of healing for those who have suffered developmental trauma and its long aftermath.

A certified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (SEP) trained directly by Dr. Peter Levine, Barbara taught Somatic Psychology for approximately twenty years at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) — one of the foremost graduate programs in somatic and depth psychology in the United States. She is also an internationally recognized teacher of Authentic Movement, a contemplative body practice rooted in Jungian active imagination that she has taught across the United States and abroad for approximately forty years.

Her clinical writing explores the relationship of body, trauma, self, and our participation in the dream of the earth. Her articles have been published in Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Psychological Perspectives, and the Journal of Analytic Psychology. She has also contributed a chapter to The Body in Psychotherapy (North Atlantic Press) and a chapter to the anthology Authentic Movement: Moving the Body, Moving the Self, Being Moved (Jessica Kingsley Publishers). She maintains memberships in the International Association of Analytical Psychology (IAAP), the United States Association for Body Psychotherapy (USABP), the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP), and the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT).

Her book, Being with the Body in Depth Psychology: Development, Trauma, and Transformation in the Unspoken Realm (Routledge, 2025) — with a foreword by Donald Kalsched — draws on decades of clinical experience to offer psychotherapists and clinicians of all levels a comprehensive, practice-grounded guide to the bodily basis of depth psychotherapeutic healing. Endorsed by Peter A. Levine, Joseph Cambray, Fanny Brewster, Jack Kornfield, Ursula Wirtz, and Christopher G. Walling, PsyD, MBA, SEP (Associate Professor, Somatic Psychology, CIIS; Past President, United States Association for Body Psychotherapy), the book is recognized as a landmark contribution to the field of embodied depth psychology.