Currently, Marlan is in private practice and serves as adjunct professor of Clinical Psychology at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.
A number of Jungian psychoanalysts who work in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and elsewhere have attended the Pittsburgh Institute Analytic Training Program and have graduated from the IRSJA.
He was also a cofounder and the first president of the "Psychology-Psychoanalyst Forum," which has since become the “Psychoanalytic Clinicians,” Section 5 of the American Psychological Association’s Division 39.
Marlan’s interests in the human psyche extend beyond the typical limits of psychology and psychoanalysis, into areas of religion, spirituality, and the study of experimentation with psychedelics.
His analysis in some measure deconstructs the views of both standard Western psychology and standard Jungian psychological theory, by treating the darkness as a complement to Jung's notion of the “Self.” His investigation draws on a large variety of sources, including Jungian and Archetypal theory, clinical examples, literature, poetry, art, philosophy, and religious mysticism in order to highlight the value these experiences of “darkness” can have and how they can in principle serve the purposes of psychological growth and individuation.
[9] Marlan's approach to alchemy in part takes up the alchemical studies of both Carl Jung and of James Hillman but especially underlines the value of alchemy for understanding and re-imagining the nature of depth psychology as a whole, counteracting certain tendencies toward literalism and essentialism in contemporary depth psychology.
Marlan's interpretations both of the history of laboratory alchemy and of depth psychology elucidate aspects of each, highlighting the transformative character of the alchemists' pursuit of the philosophers' stone.
[10] Marlan's publications suggest that his own clinical approach includes classical Jungian psychoanalysis and Archetypal psychology.
In his essay “Hesitation and Slowness: Gateway to Psyche’s Depth,”[11] he highlights how classical psychoanalytical thinkers, including Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, recognized the importance of allowing the psyche of one's patient to unfold in its own time, without pressure from the side of the analyst.
For Marlan, the terms “hesitation” and “slowness” encompass a number of related ideas, including slow and careful (not active) listening on the part of the analyst, avoiding influencing the patient, allowing for the psyche of the patient to develop at its own pace and rhythm, and a certain amount of conscious reserve on the part of the analyst over and against the tendency to formulate material either too glibly or to reduce material to general theoretical precepts.
Though he admits that there are times when spontaneous formulations are appropriate, Marlan suggests there is a tendency in the age of “industrialized” psychotherapy and under the pressures of managed care to move more quickly than the psyche's own tempo demands.
The Black Sun, summarized above, also includes specific clinical emphases related to the issue of hesitation and slowness.
Even seemingly unbearable affects, Marlan maintains, can have important and profound meanings, which can be lost through attempting to speed through the difficult and uncomfortable feelings associated with the darkness.
Annual Book Prize awarded by the American Board of Professional Psychology and the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis (ABAPsa) for best theoretical book in Psychoanalysis in 2021, C. G. Jung and the Alchemical Imagination: Passages into the Mysteries of Psyche and Soul, Routledge.
Award for the Best Theoretical Book of 2022 from the International Association of Jungian Studies (IAJS) for Jung's Alchemical Philosophy.