The mission of Pacifica Graduate Institute is to provide graduate degree programs and to foster research in the fields of psychology and mythological studies framed in the traditions of depth psychology.

The Institute seeks to fulfill this purpose by creating an educational environment which nourishes respect for cultural diversity and individual differences and an academic community which fosters for its faculty and students a spirit of free and open inquiry consistent with the recognized values of academic freedom.

Pacifica is dedicated to cultivating and harvesting the gifts of the human imagination so that these insights may be brought to bear upon the personal, cultural, and planetary concerns of our era. This dedication is contained in Pacifica's motto: animae mundi colendae gratia (for the sake of tending soul in and of the world).

Pacifica traces many of its central ideas to the heritage of ancient story tellers, dramatists, and philosophers from all lands who recorded the workings of the imagination. The legacies of these early men and women have evolved in multiple cultural contexts and perspectives including the systematic explorations of the unconscious by Freud, Jung, and other theorists of this century.

The concepts of depth psychology resulting from this long development are at the core of Pacifica's orientation. These ideas—such as the importance of symbol and metaphor in personal and cultural imagery or the recognition of the dynamic interplay between the natural world and the world of the human psyche—are articulated in all of the Institute's programs. Pacifica has a distinct sense of purpose in sustaining and imparting this rich body of knowledge about the intricacies of human imagination.

Pacifica works to extend psychology and mythological studies beyond the personal and beyond the consulting room or the classroom. We see psychological life as an evolutionary development within nature, alive in all the phenomena and systems of our world.  In studying and  working with the multidimensional exchanges among the psyche of the individual, the mythologies of the culture, the collective human imagination, and the living planet, depth psychology has an important contribution to bring to the contemporary concerns of our world. It is central to our mission to maintain an open and responsive attitude toward  a future that expresses its longings and wisdom in our dreams and aspirations.