None of this is theoretical. Here’s how it started.

Tracey Cleantis-Dwyer discovered Carl Jung at sixteen and understood, immediately, that depth was everywhere — in dreams, in symbols, in stories, in the parts of ourselves we haven’t yet made conscious.

She trained at Pacifica Graduate Institute, studied Jungian and depth psychology, and deepened that training at the C.G. Jung Centers in Chicago and Los Angeles — including years in her own personal Jungian analysis and further study at the Jung Center in Evanston, Illinois. She’s long believed you have to do your own depth work before you can guide anyone else through theirs. For over twenty-five years, she’s worked as a licensed marriage and family therapist and depth coach, helping people make the unconscious conscious — surfacing the patterns, symbols, and unspoken material running underneath their lives — so they can integrate it into their goals, actions, and relationships, rather than being quietly run by it.

Along the way, one thread became a particular specialty: the unexamined relationship between what we wear and what we cannot say. Her graduate thesis, The Genesis of Shame: The Fig Leaf of Fashion and Its Place in Psychotherapy, gave that idea its first formal shape — and it went on to become a recurring thread in her writing, showing up again and again alongside everything else she wrote about depth psychology.

That writing took many forms. It became a Psychology Today column, Freudian Sip: Making Depth Psychology Accessible One Sip at a Time, and pieces for the Huffington Post. It became two books: The Next Happy: Let Go of the Life You Planned and Find a New Way Forward, on releasing dreams that no longer serve you and finding your way to a new one, and An Invitation to Self-Care: Why Learning to Nurture Yourself Is the Key to the Life You’ve Always Wanted, on what self-care actually means beyond the spa day.

When everyone in self-help was selling the gospel of never giving up, The Next Happy said sometimes quitting is the bravest thing you can do. It received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, hit number one on Amazon in the happiness category, and was nominated for Best Psychology Book of the Year at the Books for a Better Life Awards. Then she did it again: when self-care had been reduced to spa days and scented candles, An Invitation to Self-Care argued that genuine self-care isn’t a treat — it’s a practice most people are actively avoiding while calling it indulgence. The bubble bath industrial complex was not pleased. Readers were relieved.

Same move, different terrain: find what the culture thinks it understands, look underneath, tell the uncomfortable truth — and if possible, make it a little fun. The work of Freud, Jung, Hillman, and Winnicott informs all of it, in the consulting room, on the page, and in the way she reads the world. The goal is always real change, not just insight — insight without change is just expensive self-awareness.

Material Unconscious, her Substack, is the latest place that instinct has landed — and the full flowering of that original thesis. What we wear. What we keep. What we cannot throw away no matter how many times we try. The wardrobe, it turns out, is one of the richest entry points into the unconscious we have, and a powerful place to birth self-awareness and growth.

Her life’s work rests on a single belief: that depth is everywhere, that it belongs to everyone, and that no path toward it is too small or too strange to matter — and that with awareness and exploration, life can be richer, happier, and more meaningful.

In the Media

Tracey has written for the Huffington Post, and for years wrote “Freudian Sips” as a Psychology Today columnist. Her work and insight have appeared in Health, First for Women, Redbook, Salon, Aeon, Psychologies Magazine, The Daily Mail, Mode Magazine, Yahoo News, and YourTango, among others — and on air, on NPR Wisconsin, Fox News Boston, KTLA5, and Portland’s AM Northwest.