My PhD developed out of a long-held desire to study the subjects that had been calling to me for years but had rarely been housed within a single formal path of study. I wanted to explore mythology, archetypes, symbolism, biblical study, depth psychology, and creative practice as interconnected expressions of a deeper inquiry into meaning, transformation, and the inner life. In retrospect, the St. Jerome essay I wrote while working on my master's degree in Fine art at the Academy of Art University of San Franscisco was likely one of the earliest catalysts for this journey. At the time I wrote it, I did not yet have the vocabulary, research framework, or conceptual structure to understand fully what I was seeking. I only knew that I was drawn to certain kinds of questions—questions that would later become central to my self designed doctoral work.
The structure of the PhD emerged by organizing those longstanding concerns into a coherent interdisciplinary curriculum. Rather than separating the spiritual from the psychological, or the scholarly from the creative, I designed my program so that mythology, symbolism, biblical study, Jungian thought, art, and reflective writing could inform one another. What eventually became my PhD was, in many ways, the mature form of a question I had already been asking years earlier. The vocabulary came later, and the structure came later with the help of AI, but the impulse itself had been present for a long time.