Download or read book Psychoanalysis as a Spiritual Discipline written by Paul Marcus and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The great existential psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger famously pointed out to Freud that therapeutic failure could "only be understood as the result of something which could be called a deficiency of spirit." Binswanger was surprised when Freud agreed, asserting, "Yes, spirit is everything." However, spirit and the spiritual realm have largely been dropped from mainstream psychoanalytic theory and practice. This book seeks to help revitalize a culturally aging psychoanalysis that is in conceptual and clinical disarray in the marketplace of ideas and is viewed as a "theory in crisis" no longer regarded as the primary therapy for those who are suffering. The author argues that psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy can be reinvigorated as a discipline if it is animated by the powerfully evocative spiritual, moral, and ethical insights of two dialogical personalist religious philosophers—Martin Buber, a Jew, and Gabriel Marcel, a Catholic—who both initiated a "Copernican revolution" in human thought. In chapters that focus on love, work, faith, suffering, and clinical practice, Paul Marcus shows how the spiritual optic of Buber and Marcel can help revive and refresh psychoanalysis, and bring it back into the light by communicating its inherent vitality, power, and relevance to the mental health community and to those who seek psychoanalytic treatment.
Download or read book Psychoanalysis as a Spiritual Discipline written by Paul Marcus and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-26 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The great existential psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger famously pointed out to Freud that therapeutic failure could "only be understood as the result of something which could be called a deficiency of spirit." Binswanger was surprised when Freud agreed, asserting, "Yes, spirit is everything." However, spirit and the spiritual realm have largely been dropped from mainstream psychoanalytic theory and practice. This book seeks to help revitalize a culturally aging psychoanalysis that is in conceptual and clinical disarray in the marketplace of ideas and is viewed as a "theory in crisis" no longer regarded as the primary therapy for those who are suffering. The author argues that psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy can be reinvigorated as a discipline if it is animated by the powerfully evocative spiritual, moral, and ethical insights of two dialogical personalist religious philosophers—Martin Buber, a Jew, and Gabriel Marcel, a Catholic—who both initiated a "Copernican revolution" in human thought. In chapters that focus on love, work, faith, suffering, and clinical practice, Paul Marcus shows how the spiritual optic of Buber and Marcel can help revive and refresh psychoanalysis, and bring it back into the light by communicating its inherent vitality, power, and relevance to the mental health community and to those who seek psychoanalytic treatment.
Download or read book The Spiritual Psyche in Psychotherapy written by Willow Pearson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-09 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the interaction of spiritual and psychoanalytic lineages with psychotherapy in everyday practice. Written by a team of seasoned clinicians and illustrated through clinical vignettes, chapters explore topics pertaining to the mystical dimensions of psychological and spiritual life and how it may be integrated into clinical practice. Topics discussed include dreams, dissociation, creativity, therapeutic relationship, free association, transcendence, poetry, paradox, doubleness, loss, death, grief, mystery, embodiment and soul. The authors, clinicians with decades of experience in psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and spiritual practice, draw from their deep engagement with spirituality and psychoanalysis, focusing on a particular theme and its application to clinical work that is supported by the generative conversation among these lineages. At once applied and theoretical, this book weaves insights from the heart of Vajrayana Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Christianity, Catholicism, Ecumenicism, Integral Spirituality, Judaism, Kaballah, Non-violence, Sufism and Vedanta. They are in conversation with psychoanalytic perspectives including Jungian, Post-Jungian, Winnicottian, Bionian, Post-Bionian and Relational. A felt sense of the spiritual psyche in clinical practice emerges from this conversation among spiritual and psychoanalytic lineages, beckoning clinicians ever further on the path of spiritually rooted, psychodynamic practice.
Download or read book In Search of the Spiritual written by Paul Marcus and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a most impressive and important study of the presence of the spiritual and the sacred in the writings of the twentieth century French philosopher Gabriel Marcel, offering immense help in understanding Marcel and in seeing the usefulness of his ideas in psychoanalysis.
Download or read book The Search for Meaning in Psychotherapy written by Judith Pickering and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-03-27 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2020 American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis (ABAPsa) book award winner! If, when a patient enters therapy, there is an underlying yearning to discover a deeper sense of meaning or purpose, how might a therapist rise to such a challenge? As both Carl Jung and Wilfred Bion observed, the patient may be seeking something that has a spiritual as well as psychotherapeutic dimension. Presented in two parts, The Search for Meaning in Psychotherapy is a profound inquiry into the contemplative, mystical and apophatic dimensions of psychoanalysis. What are some of the qualities that may inspire processes of growth, healing and transformation in a patient? Part One, The Listening Cure: Psychotherapy as Spiritual Practice, considers the confluence between psychotherapy, spirituality, mysticism, meditation and contemplation. The book explores qualities such as presence, awareness, attention, mindfulness, calm abiding, reverie, patience, compassion, insight and wisdom, as well as showing how they may be enhanced by meditative and spiritual practice. Part Two, A Ray of Divine Darkness: Psychotherapy and the Apophatic Way, explores the relevance of apophatic mysticism to psychoanalysis, particularly showing its inspiration through the work of Wilfred Bion. Paradoxically using language to unsay itself, the apophatic points towards absolute reality as ineffable and unnameable. So too, Bion observed, psychoanalysis requires the ability to dwell in mystery awaiting intimations of ultimate truth, O, which cannot be known, only realised. Pickering reflects on the works of key apophatic mystics including Dionysius, Meister Eckhart and St John of the Cross; Buddhist teachings on meditation; Śūnyatā and Dzogchen; and Lévinas’ ethics of alterity. The Search for Meaning in Psychotherapy will be of great interest to both trainees and accomplished practitioners in psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, psychotherapy and counselling, as well as scholars of religious studies, those in religious orders, spiritual directors, priests and meditation teachers.
Download or read book Psyche the Soul of Therapy written by Miles J. Matise and published by BalboaPress. This book was released on 2012-02-15 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book purports to redefine therapy as a spiritual practice requiring discipline and a process of creating meaning for ones life. The word psyche originally meant soul, and it is that which this book leads the reader back to. As a professional psychotherapist, Dr. Matise describes Freud as not just the discoverer of psychoanalysis but as one who was more spiritual in his approach than is given credit. The book calls therapy back to its roots and original intentions as soul work. Therapy is not just for the sick of mind but more and more acceptable to all people, as our modern lives become busier and more detached from one another. The pressures to succeed and be happy, though widely held Western values, have left individuals devoid of real meaning. In the age of quick fixes, therapy as a process of spiritual growth and development has lost its appeal and conditions us to avoid legitimate pain at all costs. The book provides case studies to clarify the integration of psychology and spirituality. While written from the perspective of a psychotherapist, its audience is far wider, as the book explores human nature and the existential questions of humanity, rather than the nuts and bolts of therapy. This book is for the searcher in each of us who is seeking a deeper experience of what it means to really live and not so much be happy, but be real.
Download or read book Relating to God written by Dan Merkur and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Relating to God: Clinical Psychoanalysis, Spirituality, and Theism, Dan Merkur conceptualizes religious discourse within psychoanalysis. He proposes that God be treated as a transferential figure whose analysis leads to a reduction of the parental content that is projected onto God. Merkur notes that religious conversion experiences regularly involve theological intuitions that are either rational or, owing to morbid complications, have undergone displacement into irrational symbolism. Analysis renders the religiosity more wholesome. Traditionally, psychoanalytic thought has been dismissive of religion. Freud is on record, however, as having called psychoanalysis a neutral procedure. He argued that religion, with its dependency on a providential God who punishes disobedience, imagines spirituality on the model of human parents and fails to approach spirituality in an appropriately scientific manner. He wrote little of spiritual phenomena, but mentioned both the rationality of the universe and the parapsychological occurrence of thought transference. Occasionally, later psychoanalysts used different language in order to contrast wholesome and morbid forms of religion. Erich Fromm distinguished authoritarian and humanistic religions, while D. W. Winnicott condemned fetishistic behavior while approving of playful illusions that require “belief-in.” These formulations constructed a middle position for clinicians, neither categorically opposed to religion as classical psychoanalysis was, nor do they embrace cultural relativity as “spiritually oriented” psychotherapists are currently advocating. What sorts of spiritual practices does psychoanalysis find unobjectionable? As examples of humanistic religion, Fromm named Zen Buddhism, Buddhist mindfulness meditation, and the via negativa or “way of negating” that some Christian and Jewish mystics have followed. Because the Bible-based approaches are little known, Merkur discusses their histories, procedures, and psychoanalytic understanding.
Download or read book Soul on the Couch written by Charles Spezzano and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-17 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since Freud put religion on the couch in "The Future of an Illusion," there has been an uneasy peace, with occasional skirmishes, between these two great disciplines of subjectivity. As prime meaning givers, God and the unconscious have vied for supremacy in our thinking about ourselves, especially our thinking about our human nature, our moral stature, and our destiny. Freud, in his bold manner, found projection, fear, and denial to be the wellspring of religion's domination over man. In analogous fashion, those giving primacy to the soul over the unconscious have long dismissed psychoanalysis as mechanistic, reductionistic, and hence inadequate to the examination of spirituality. Soul on the Couch is premised on the belief that discourse about the soul and discourse from the couch can inform, and not simply ignore, one another. It brings together scholars and psychoanalysts at the forefront of an interdisciplinary dialogue that is vitally important to the growth of both disciplines. Their essays are not only models of reflective inquiry; they also illuminate the syntheses that emerge when analysts and scholars of religion bridge the gap that has long separated them and speak to one another.
Download or read book Mad and Divine written by Sudhir Kakar and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sudhir Kakar, India’s foremost practitioner of psychoanalysis, has focused his career on infusing this preeminently Western discipline with ideas and views from the East. In Mad and Divine, he takes on the separation of the spirit and the body favored by psychoanalysts, cautioning that a single-minded focus on the physical denies a person’s wholeness. Similarly, Kakar argues, to focus on the spirit alone is to hold in contempt the body that makes us human. Mad and Divine looks at the interplay between spirit and psyche and the moments of creativity and transformation that occur when the spirit overcomes desire and narcissism. Kakar examines this relationship in religious rituals and healing traditions— both Eastern and Western—as well as in the lives of some extraordinary men: the mystic and guru Rajneesh, Gandhi, and the Buddhist saint Drukpa Kunley. Enriched with a novelist’s felicity of language and an analyst’s piercing insights and startling interpretations, Mad and Divine is a valuable addition to the literature on the integration of the spirit and psyche in the evolving psychology of the individual.
Download or read book Spiritually Sensitive Psychoanalysis written by Gideon Lev and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-29 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an accessible introduction to spiritually sensitive psychoanalysis, an analytic tradition characterized by sensitivity to the spiritual and religious dimensions of human life and oriented towards spiritual growth. Psychoanalysis has historically evinced severe suspicion to all ideas and ideals of religion and spirit. However, in recent years, a new analytic approach is emerging, which recognizes faith and spirituality as crucial parts of full, satisfying psychic life. This book explores the unique ways in which this approach refers to and understands core analytic issues such as transference, interpretation, psychopathology and psychic development. It goes on to expound the approach’s understanding of the analytic relationship and the way it influences the spiritual person. It also discusses the tensions arising between this emerging school of thought and the existing body of psychoanalytic knowledge. Psychoanalysis is a practice that deals with the most profound questions of life and creates shifts in the way reality is perceived. Discussing freely and deeply its spiritual aspects and aspirations will enlighten analysts new to the emerging spiritually sensitive tradition, as well as those who are more familiar with it, and who are looking for a comprehensive description of this fresh approach to analysis.
Download or read book The Druid of Harley Street written by E. Graham Howe and published by North Atlantic Books. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early 20th-century Britain, interest in psychoanalysis was high, leading to the formation of the famous Tavistock Clinic in 1920. E. Graham Howe was one of the clinic’s founders and the first to publish articles on psychotherapy. At the same time, he was attacked by the “scientific” psychiatry and psychoanalysis communities because he took concepts derived from spiritual practice and existential phenomenology and applied them to an understanding of psychotherapy. Howe’s writings included more than a dozen books and countless articles on a broad range of subjects from schizophrenia to Asian spiritual practices. Through these works he exerted a profound influence on intellectuals such as R. D. Laing, Alan Watts, and Henry Miller, to name a few. Howe also wrote in a simple and clear style, making his work accessible to the general public. The Druid of Harley Street samples the best of his essays, offering timely insights for followers of Jung, Roberto Assagioli, and Mark Epstein; students of somatic therapies; and spiritual and meditation practitioners. The book also offers a fascinating glimpse of a great mind, the notable people in his life, and the heady times in which he lived.
Download or read book Spirit Mind Brain written by Mortimer Ostow and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preeminent psychoanalyst Mortimer Ostow believes that early childhood emotional attachments form the cognitive underpinnings of spiritual experience and religious motivation. His hypothesis, which is verifiable, relies on psychological and neurobiological evidence but is respectful of the human need for spiritual value. Ostow begins by classifying the three parts of the spiritual experience: awe, Spirituality proper, and mysticism. After he pinpoints the psychological origins of these feelings in infancy, he discusses the foundations of religious sentiment and practice and the brain processes associated with spiritual experience. He then focuses on spirituality's relationship to mood regulation, and the role of negative spirituality in fostering religious fundamentalism and demonic possession. Ostow concludes with an analysis of an essay by the psychoanalyst Donald M. Marcus, who recounts his own spiritual experience during a Native American-style "vision quest" in the woods. Marcus's account demonstrates the constructive potential of spirituality and the way in which spirituality retrieves and recapitulates feelings of attachment to the mother. Persuasively and brilliantly argued, Spirit, Mind, and Brain brings the disciplines of religion, behavorial neuroscience, and philosophy to bear on a groundbreaking new method for understanding religious ritual and belief.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality written by Lisa J. Miller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-06 with total page 849 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This updated edition of The Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality codifies the leading empirical evidence in the support and application of postmaterial psychological science. Lisa J. Miller has gathered together a group of ground-breaking scholars to showcase their work of many decades that has come further to fruition in the past ten years with the collective momentum of a Spiritual Renaissance in Psychological Science. With new and updated chapters from leading scholars in psychology, medicine, physics, and biology, the Handbook is an interdisciplinary reference for a rapidly emerging approach to contemporary science. Highlighting fresh ideas and supporting science, this overarching work provides both a foundation and a roadmap for what is truly a new ideological age.
Download or read book Ancient Religious Wisdom Spirituality and Psychoanalysis written by Paul Marcus and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2003-04-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a rationale for a spiritually animated psychoanalysis. Classic world religious literature is analyzed in depth showing how Ecclesiastes, St. Augustine's Confessions, The Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, and others can enhance psychoanalysis. Marcus argues that psychoanalysis is a theory and profession in crisis, partly due to its alienation from the spiritual and moral philosophies contained in ancient religious wisdom. This volume presents the spiritual as a core dimension of the psyche, and the quest for self-transcendence—meeting the glory of the Infinite—as a quest inherent in the human condition. Of special interest to those studying psychoanalysis, psychology, and religious studies, this volume may also intrigue those studying the philosophy of religion.
Download or read book Toward Mutual Recognition written by Marie T. Hoffman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-01-19 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since its nascent days, psychoanalysis has enjoyed an uneasy coexistence with religion. However, in recent decades, many analysts have been more interested in the healing potential of both psychoanalytic and religious experience and have explored how their respective narrative underpinnings may be remarkably similar. In Toward Mutual Recognition, Marie T. Hoffman takes just such an approach. Coming from a Christian perspective, she suggests that the current relational turn in psychoanalysis has been influenced by numerous theorists - analysts and philosophers alike - who were themselves shaped by an embedded Christian narrative. As a result, the redemptive concepts of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection - central to the tenets of Christianity - can be traced to relational theories, emerging analogously in the transformative process of mutual recognition in the concepts of identification, surrender, and gratitude, a trilogy which she develops as forming the "path of recognition." Each movement on this path of recognition is given thought-provoking, in-depth attention. Chapters dedicated to theoretical perspectives utilize the thinking of Benjamin, Hegel, and Ricoeur. In her historical perspectives, she explores the personal and professional histories of analysts such as Sullivan, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Erikson, Kohut, and Ferenczi, among others, who were influenced by the Christian narrative. Uniting it all together is the clinical perspective offered in the compelling extended case history of Mandy, a young lady whose treatment embodies and exemplifies each of the steps along the path of growth in both the psychoanalytic and Christian senses. Throughout, a relational sensibility is deployed as a cooperative counterpart to the Christian narrative, working both as a consilient dialogue and a vehicle for further integrative exploration. As a result, the specter of psychoanalysis and religion as mutually exclusive gives way to the hope and redemption offered by their mutual recognition.
Download or read book Psychoanalysis and Buddhism written by Jeremy D. Safran and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2003 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Psychoanalysis and Buddhism" pairs Buddhist psychotherapists together with leading figures in psychoanalysis who have a general interest in the role of spirituality in psychology. The resulting essays present an illuminating discourse on these two disciplines and how they intersect. This landmark book challenges traditional thoughts on psychoanalysis and Buddhism and propels them to a higher level of understanding.
Download or read book Psychoanalysis and Wisdom written by Paul Marcus and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-04-22 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychoanalysis and Wisdom applies psychoanalytic insights into one of the great examples of wisdom literature, the Ethics of the Fathers, an ethical tractate of the Talmud. Paul Marcus quotes key passages from the Ethics of the Fathers, providing a psychoanalytic commentary to enlarge and deepen our understanding of its contents, focusing primarily on what constitutes a flourishing life. Marcus then considers what psychoanalysis can provide in its engagement with this classic of the wisdom teachings, such as illuminating aspects of the Ethics that are overlooked or underappreciated, and how “pearls of wisdom” from the Ethics can be incorporated into psychoanalytic theory and practice. The book contains clinical material as well as the insights of philosophers like Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel and Emmanuel Levinas. Psychoanalysis and Wisdom will appeal to readers interested in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and to academics and students of psychoanalytic studies, religious studies, Judaic studies and philosophy.
