What is the difference between depth psychology and psychoanalysis?

The two terms are not synonyms, though they are often used interchangeably — and the confusion is old enough that Jung himself had to sort it out. The short answer is that psychoanalysis is a specific method and school founded by Freud, while depth psychology is the broader category that contains it.

The word "depth psychology" (Tiefenpsychologie) was coined not by Freud but by Eugen Bleuler, the Swiss psychiatrist under whom Jung trained at the Burghölzli. Jung records the etymology plainly in The Symbolic Life:

"Depth psychology" is a term deriving from medical psychology, coined by Eugen Bleuler to denote that branch of psychological science which is concerned with the phenomenon of the unconscious.

Bleuler's coinage was descriptive and neutral — it named any psychology that took the unconscious seriously, without specifying whose theory of the unconscious was correct. Freud's psychoanalysis was the first major occupant of that category, but the category was always larger than the occupant.

What separates the schools is not the shared premise — that unconscious processes shape conscious life — but what they find when they go down. Freud's unconscious is primarily a repository of repressed biographical content: childhood wishes, traumatic memories, the residue of instinctual life that consciousness has refused. As Jung put it, Freud saw the unconscious as "a sort of store-room where all the things consciousness had discarded were heaped up and left" (Edinger, 2002, paraphrasing Jung's own retrospective account). The therapeutic aim follows from this: excavate the repressed material, trace the symptom back to its biographical cause, and the neurosis loses its grip. Psychoanalysis is, in this sense, an etiological enterprise — it moves backward toward origins.

Jung's break with Freud, formalized in Symbols of Transformation (1912), turned on precisely this point. Where Freud read the symptom as pathological residue, Jung heard it as an event with prospective meaning — the psyche speaking a symbolic language that points forward, not only backward. More decisively, Jung discovered a stratum of the unconscious that Freud's model could not account for: the collective unconscious, populated not by personal memories but by universal structuring patterns he called archetypes. Edinger (2002) describes the difference vividly: Freud's unconscious offered "no special problem, save that of getting rid of it," while Jung's collective unconscious was not to be dissipated but assimilated — "the sea from which the conscious ego emerges."

Hillman pressed this distinction further when he renamed the field "archetypal psychology" in the early 1970s. His objection to the label "analytical psychology" was partly strategic — analysis as a word implies a problem to be solved, a clinic, a case — but it was also substantive. As he argued in Archetypal Psychology (1983):

When "analytical" defines our field, we are mainly occupied with what used to be called "the practical intellect." Several consequences flow from this... analytical psychology is naturally interested in therapy and in the many questions of profession.

Hillman's move was to free depth psychology from its identification with the consulting room altogether — to insist that the psyche's archetypal life occurs in culture, image, myth, and history, not only in the transference. Depth psychology, on this reading, is a way of seeing, not merely a clinical technique.

The practical upshot: psychoanalysis is one method within depth psychology, defined by Freud's specific theoretical commitments (the primacy of repression, the sexual etiology of neurosis, the transference as the engine of cure). Depth psychology names the wider field — any psychology that takes the unconscious as its primary subject — and includes psychoanalysis, Jung's analytical psychology, Hillman's archetypal psychology, and the various post-Jungian schools that have grown from them. The difference is genus and species: depth psychology is the genus; psychoanalysis is one species within it, distinguished by what it believes it finds in the depths and what it proposes to do there.

analytical psychology — the school Jung founded after his break with Freud, and how it differs from psychoanalysis
individuation — the developmental arc that distinguishes Jungian depth work from Freudian symptom-reduction
James Hillman — portrait of the thinker who pushed depth psychology furthest from the clinic
Edward Edinger — portrait of the classic Jungian who mapped the ego-Self axis and the collective unconscious

Sources Cited

Jung, C.G., 1976, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life
Edinger, Edward F., 2002, Science of the Soul: A Jungian Perspective
Hillman, James, 1983, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account