[1] It origin as an educational institution dates to the 1976 inauguration of a nine-month para-professional Counseling Skills Certificate program offered by the Human Relations Center.

The program was launched in 1984 by Stan Passy, who drew on his doctoral work in archetypal psychology with James Hillman at the University of Dallas.

[5] The mythological studies program was created in 1994 by Jonathan Young, building on his work as founding curator of the Joseph Campbell Archives.

[7] Reaching full capacity for Santa Barbara County permitted operations at the Lambert Road campus in 1999, Pacifica began offering additional sections of existing programs at La Casa de Maria's newly established Ladera Lane Retreat Center (site of a former Jesuit novitiate).

Pacifica became a two-campus school by purchasing the Ladera Lane center from La Casa de Maria in September 2005.

[8] In September 2013 and March 2014, groups of former and current Ph.D. students from the clinical psychology program filed a lawsuit stating that the school misrepresented its APA accreditation status.

Past presenters include Joseph Campbell, Jean Houston, Michael J. Meade, Huston Smith, Malidoma Patrice Somé, Sonu Shamdasani, Thomas Moore, Marion Woodman, James Hillman, and Robert Bly.

The Organic Garden, consisting of 7 acres (2.8 ha), is farmed year round, producing vegetables and fruits available to the community.

The Graduate Research Libraries on the Lambert and Ladera campuses contain over 26,000 books, provide access to over 300,000 ebooks, 4,000 theses and dissertations, and 2,000 audio and video materials.

To fulfill its mission of functioning as a living archive, Opus also offers scholarships, research grants, educational programs, and community events.

[26] Joseph Campbell's papers and collections were entrusted to the OPUS Archives and Research Center on the campuses of Pacifica Graduate Institute.

[29] Campbell's library features approximately 3,000 volumes and covers a broad range of subjects including anthropology, folklore, religion, literature, and psychology.

The center is a living archive, supporting interdisciplinary dialogue, education, grants, research opportunities and public programs.

Throughout her career Woodman focused on the relationship of psyche and soma and this specialization, particularly as it manifested in the experiences and lives of women, was groundbreaking in the field of Jungian studies.

PlumX gathers and brings together metrics for all types of scholarly research output, including published books, journal articles, conference papers, videos, data sets, interviews, and other online web resources.

Pacifica's PlumX installation categorizes Pacifica metrics into 5 separate types: usage (e.g. downloads and library holdings), captures (e.g. bookmarks, favorites, readers, watchers), mentions (e.g. blog posts, comments, reviews), social media (e.g. likes, shares, tweets), and citations (how many times research has been cited).