Digging

I have just begun to train as a psychotherapist. The biggest and most satisfying revelation so far is that this is a logical progression for me.
My background and passion is history. I trained and worked as an archivist, the best job in the world. I have since moved up the pole into cultural services management, earning more money but losing the ability to combine work and pleasure.
This course is my escape route to freedom and fulfilment but it seemed, at first, a bit left field. Last week, however, I had a revelatory moment when my tutor described psychotherapy as 'like archaeology'. All of a sudden it all came together: digging around on the banks of the Thames (an obsessive ambition of mine), delving into local and family history and uncovering one's own and other people's hidden thoughts and past influences are one and the same thing.

 Jung was convinced from childhood that he had two personalities — a modern Swiss citizen and a personality more at home in the eighteenth century "Personality Number 1," as he termed it, was a typical schoolboy living in the era of the time, while "Personality Number 2" was a dignified, authoritative and influential man from the past.

Cognitive archaeology is a sub-discipline of archaeology which focuses (from Wikipedia) on the ways that ancient societies thought and the symbolic structures that can be perceived in past material culture.

Cognitive archaeologists often study the role that ideology and differing organizational approaches would have had on ancient peoples. The way that these abstract ideas are manifested through the remains that these peoples have left can be investigated and debated often by drawing inferences and using approaches developed in fields such as semiotics, psychology and the wider sciences