3. Psychotherapists are recognizing the importance of spirituality

By Tom O'Connell

Psychotherapists are recognizing the importance of spirituality more now, after nearly a century of de-emphasizing the mystical. Evidence of this was provided recently at the 20th Cape Cod Institute of Albert Einstein College of Medicine. During ten of those  years a special session has been offered with this title: "Psychotherapy and Spirituality."

As the 20th Century was closing, and the 21st was about to be ushered in, it seemed to me that the world of therapy was finally giving the whole person a chance. But the idea of integrating the spirit with the world of therapy has been slow arriving.

For more than twenty years, as a writer exploring the field of psychology, I have been astounded that professional therapists were trying to break humans into component parts to be viewed separately. Cognitions, libidos, and complexes don't live in a vacuum. Body, mind, and spirit are inseparable. Have you seen a mind without a body? Or an emotion disconnected from a person? Or a body separated from its life-giving spirit?

Nevertheless, many psychologists have tried over the years to heal clients without taking into consideration that the human spirit is fundamental, not just something that's added on as an afterthought, or a bit of superstition. How could this fateful flaw in the profession of psychology have happened? I think it's because they were trying to make the "healing arts" more scientific, and they got lost in the process.

After all, the original psychotherapists didn't claim to be scientists. They were shamans, witch doctors, priests, and ministers. Then some people called "alienists" began to deal with people's mental health problems. And eventually, during the 19th century, psychoanalysts emerged. Then in the 20th century we produced enough "scientific" professional psychologists to service every city, town and village.

So what a relief it has been for me to attend sessions on the link between spirituality and psychotherapy at the Cape Cod Institutes. In these sessions a team of psychotherapists, with their spirituality out front, provides dialogue on the connection between clinical practice and spiritual inquiry.

Featured presenter John McDargh, Ph.D., associate professor of religion and psychology at Boston College, explained, "We continue to inhabit the territory between the wisdom of spiritual traditions, east and west, and the insights and practices of contemporary psychoanalysis." He said, "The seminar has remained fresh and fruitful  by bringing to the conversation each year the intellectual, moral and spiritual issues that arise for us in our professional practice and spiritual lives."

Here are some of the thoughtful comments made by Professor McDargh at the recent Institute:

* We are made in the image and likeness of God, a mystery that desires relatedness, and all Creation is for the sake of relationship...The infant at the breast interrupts feeding to make eye contact because we are constituted for relationship.

* The heart's deepest intentionality is to relate to a wider and more inclusive, expansive world. This is a natural desire. Prayer itself is a yearning or desire for a sense of connectedness, and it is also a psychological statement.

* We experience self as a part of...and also as apart from, and we want both things at the same time. That's the way humans are constituted.

* The Buddhist says, "I am not needed" and "I am turning into something of inestimable value."

* In a Hassidic story we are born with a coat that has two pockets. The first pocket says, "I am but dust and ashes." The other pocket says, "I am the child of a king and for my sake Creation was made."...Most of us only reach into one pocket. In therapy we recover the pocket related to Creation. We recognize ourselves as an individual and as one person among others.

* Eric Erickson posed three questions: How am I like no other people? How am I like some other people? How am I like all other people?

* The inscription over Carl Jung's doorway said, "Called or not, God comes."

* I don't need to name God. I need to pay attention to the manifestation of the activity of the holy in people's lives.

Among other subjects mentioned by McDargh and his colleagues were Moses and the burning bush (I Am Who Am), the Dalai Lama, the tradition of Thomas Merton, the meditation tradition of Dom John Main, and Jesus saying, "The son of man has no place to lay his head." "Jesus had the tension between being settled and chronically on the move."

Many of the therapists in the seminar expressed their enthusiasm about bridging the gap between spirituality and psychotherapy. One voice described the "hunger and thirst for talking about spirituality." And, as we moved into the millennium, another voice proclaimed, "We need to trust in the power of the divine analyst."

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