Who I am and why I do this work

MY STORY

Zack Kampf

PhD, LCSW #139716 · Licensed in California & North Carolina
Faculty, Pacifica Graduate Institute

There's a particular kind of disillusionment that comes from learning something well and discovering it isn't enough. I completed graduate training in social work, became a licensed clinician, and found myself sitting with suffering I didn't have the tools to actually touch. I could manage. I could stabilize. I could teach coping skills. But I couldn't reach the thing underneath—the deeper pattern that kept regenerating the symptoms no matter how many times we addressed them on the surface.

The problem wasn't my training. The problem was the framework. Most clinical approaches treat the psyche as a system to be regulated—anxiety turned down, depression lifted, behaviors modified. What I kept encountering in myself and in my clients was something the regulatory model couldn't account for: a purposive intelligence underneath the suffering. Something like the voice of nature, trying to speak but unable to be heard.

I had actually been in contact with that intelligence for years without knowing it. I spent my twenties as a professional musician, living very close to the unconscious without language for what that meant. Music puts you in contact with something larger than yourself, something that moves through you rather than from you. I knew how to access depth there. What I didn't know was how to bring it into my clinical work.

Jung gave me the language. Encountering his work was like being handed a map of territory I'd been wandering in for years—first as a musician, then as a clinician.

Everything reoriented. The symptoms my clients were presenting weren't problems to be eliminated. They were the psyche attempting to redirect a life that had grown too small, too one-sided, too far from something essential. The unconscious wasn't an obstacle. It was the most intelligent thing in the room.

I went back to school, this time to Pacifica Graduate Institute, where I completed a doctorate in Depth Psychology with a focus on Jungian and Archetypal Studies. I wrote my dissertation on the 27 Club—Cobain, Joplin, Morrison, Winehouse—as a case study in what happens when an enormous psychological life has no adequate container. I teach at Pacifica now. I still play. And I think both of those things live in how I work: an attunement to what moves beneath the surface, and a deep respect for what can't be forced.