Ryan Coon, PsyD, Psychologist in Lakewood, Washington

I grew up in the small town of Silverton, Oregon. I took my first psychology class my junior year of high school and I’ve been a theory geek since that time. After two years of playing golf for Santa Barbara Community College I realized golf wasn’t going to pay the bills. My undergraduate degree was in Sociology and my minor was in Philosophy. I began graduate at George Fox University. I choose that program because in addition to the graduate level psychology classes, we were required to take theology classes as well. I have been a licensed psychologist since 2007 and I have been at this current practice since 2009. When trying to help a patient, I look deploy techniques from behavioral psychology, cognitive behavioral psychology, mindfulness, Internal Family Systems and I’ve been developing a Jungian Worldview since 2017. I see a Jungian coaching tree that goes from Carl Jung, to Erich Neumann to Jordan B Peterson. Discovering Jungian psychology has made me fall in love with psychology again. If you walk into my office you will see wall art that maps out the human psyche. One of the books Carl Jung wrote was Modern man in Search of a Soul. I’ll leave you with a quote from page 112 where he discusses the connection between the conscious and unconscious mind. Do we ever understand what we think? We only understand that thinking, which is a mere equation and from which nothing comes out but what we have put in. That is the working of the intellect. But beyond that there is a thinking in primordial images, in symbols which are older than historical man; which have been ingrained in him from the earliest times, and eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them. It is neither a question of belief nor of knowledge, but of the agreement of our thinking with the primordial images in the unconscious. They are the source of all our conscious thoughts, and one of these primordial thoughts is the idea of life after death. I follow a coaching tree that goes from Socrates to Carl Jung to Erich Neumann to Jordan B. Peterson. My favorite philosophy professor during my undergraduate years once told our class, I’m not here to tell you what to think, I’m here to train everyone in becoming a critical thinker. When we reach back far enough, the history of psychology becomes the history of philosophy.