Howard Teich, PhD, MS, is a psychologist, consultant, and educator whose five-decade career has advanced a unified theory of human consciousness rooted in archetypal psychology, comparative mythology, and neurobiology.
Based in San Francisco, Dr. Teich has maintained a private clinical practice for over fifty years. He was trained in Jungian analysis by Joseph Henderson and John Beebe — two of the most influential analysts in the post-Jungian tradition — and his early research at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught a course titled "Dreams: The Language of the Unconscious," established the foundation for a life's work at the intersection of depth psychology, ancient wisdom, and modern science.
Dr. Teich's signature intellectual contribution is the theory of solar and lunar consciousness — a framework that reframes the traditional masculine/feminine duality as complementary archetypal orientations rather than opposing forces. This work, developed across decades of clinical practice, teaching, and organizational consulting, represents a fundamental challenge to binary thinking in psychology and beyond. His research integrates Joseph Campbell's comparative mythology with Jungian analytical psychology and contemporary neurobiology into what he calls a tripartite integration — a unified lens for understanding human consciousness and development.
From this foundation, Dr. Teich created the PACE Profile, a proprietary personality assessment instrument originally developed for Apple. Unlike conventional typology systems, the PACE Profile maps behavioral orientation across solar and lunar dimensions, offering a dynamic model of human potential rather than fixed categories. It has since been applied in leadership development, team dynamics, and organizational consulting for companies including Microsoft, Intel, and Wells Fargo, as well as startups and venture-backed enterprises.
Dr. Teich's work in alchemy — the psychological interpretation of the ancient transformational art, as pioneered by C.G. Jung — has produced practical applications in performance, creativity, and organizational change. His workshop series The Alchemy of Acting and The Alchemy of Music apply alchemical stage theory to the creative process, offering performers and creators a map for navigating the territory between technical mastery and authentic presence.
In recent years, Dr. Teich has turned his attention to the intersection of depth psychology and artificial intelligence — a convergence he sees as the most important question of our time. His theory of complementarity provides a framework for understanding human-AI partnership as a form of the same cooperative opposition that operates at every level of nature, from quantum physics to cellular biology to the structure of consciousness itself.
Dr. Teich holds a PhD in psychology and an MS from the University of Oregon. He has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the California Institute of Integral Studies, Sonoma State University, the University of San Francisco, and the Esalen Institute. He lectures widely on creative collaboration, reflective consciousness, high-performance leadership, and the application of complementarity theory to organizational and technological decision-making.
His writings have appeared in Chrysalis, Parabola, the San Francisco Jung Institute Journal, Noetic Science Review, and Christine Downing's Mirror of the Soul, and have been included in Use of Comparative Mythology: Essays on the Work of Joseph Campbell (Garland Publishing). He has addressed groups including the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco and the International Conference on Shamanism.
Dr. Teich is the author of Solar Light, Lunar Light: Perspectives in Human Consciousness (available on Apple Books and Amazon), the forthcoming Cosmic Humanity, and co-author, with Kevin Stein, of the forthcoming The Secret of Complementarity: Beyond Binary Thinking.