Professor

Classics

Curriculum Vitae

Marcia (Dunbar-Soule) Dobson has taught at Colorado College in the Classics Department since 1976, where she specializes in the ancient Greek language, myth and religion, and chairs the Psychoanalysis minor.  She received her BA from Bennington College in Literature, where she focused her thesis on a comparison of dramatic time and the "eternal moment" in Dostoevskii's fiction. Creative writing, music and dance were also strong interests. Marcia received an MA in Classics under the Humanities from Tufts University, where she addressed issues of Neoplatonism in Marsilio Ficino and in the poetry of Edmund Spenser. Her PhD from Harvard University in Classical Philology led her to a dissertation on the nature of oracular language in the Delphic oracles and in Aeschylean tragedy. Professor Dobson received a second PhD in 1998, in Clinical Psychology with an emphasis on Depth psychology, where her dissertation crossed the disciplines, focusing on ancient Greek epic and tragedy in relation to modern psychological notions of transitional space and experience.

Over the years, Marcia has published many articles and presented papers to the  C.G. Jung Society and the International Association for Psychoanalytic Psychology. She is an associate editor of the journal Psychoanalysis, Self and Context. Her book has just been published by Routledge under George Hagman’s Art, Creativity and Psychoanalysis Series.  Its title is Metamorphoses of Psyche in Psychoanalysis and Ancient Greek Thought: From Mourning to Creativity.  Marcia is a relational self psychologist and has a small practice in Colorado Springs.

Marcia and her husband John Riker live by the Garden of Gods and enjoy their four shelties and ballroom dancing, which they teach for fun to Colorado College students.

Dobson initiated the psychoanalysis minor at Colorado College, and now teaches classes in contemporary psychoanalysis to CC students both at Colorado College and at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Chicago during the summer.

Dobson's recent research and publications consider classical texts in their relationship to psychoanalytic thinking and theory. She is also an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology.

Marcia and her spouse, John Riker, who teaches in the Philosophy Department, have four Shetland sheepdogs, and for happy pastimes, hike and play with their pups as well as teaching ballroom dancing at Colorado College.

Regular Classes

Ancient Greek Drama

Ancient Greek Language

Discovering the Unconscious

Greek History and Philosophy

Life of the Soul

Myth and Meaning