Tracey Cleantis-Dwyer discovered Carl Jung at sixteen and understood, immediately, that depth was everywhere — in dreams, in symbols, in stories, and, as it turned out, in everything hanging in her closet.

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. Her graduate thesis — The Genesis of Shame: The Fig Leaf of Fashion and Its Place in Psychotherapy — established what would become her life’s central preoccupation: the largely unexamined relationship between what we wear and what we cannot say. Her committee was intrigued. Her closet was vindicated.

Over twenty-five years of clinical practice as a licensed marriage and family therapist, that preoccupation kept showing up everywhere she looked. It became a Psychology Today column — Freudian Sip: Making Depth Psychology Accessible One Sip at a Time. It became writing for the Huffington Post. It became two books published by Hazelden/Simon & Schuster and appearances in [FULL MEDIA LIST].

When everyone in self-help was selling the gospel of never giving up, she wrote the book that said sometimes quitting is the bravest thing you can do. The Next Happy: Let Go of the Life You Planned and Find a New Way Forward received a rare starred review from Publishers Weekly, hit number one on Amazon in the happiness category, and was nominated for a Books for a Better Life Award. 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.

As a depth coach, Tracey brings that same conviction into her work with clients. The work of Freud, Jung, Hillman, and Winnicott informs everything she does — 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. That with awareness and exploration life can be richer, happier, and more meaningful.

In the Media

A contributor to the Huffington Post and columnist for Psychology Today (where she wrote “Freudian Sips”), Tracey’s work has been featured in Health, First for Women, Redbook, Salon, Aeon, Psychologies Magazine, The Daily Mail, Mode Magazine, Yahoo News, YourTango, and many others. She has appeared on NPR Wisconsin, Fox News Boston, KTLA5, and Portland’s AM Northwest.