In Search of a Paradigm for Psychological and Spiritual Growth: Implications for Psychotherapy and Spiritual Direction

This article presents categories, drawn from the work of Abraham Maslow and Paul Tillich, which can be used to explore the similarities and differences in psychological and spiritual growth. While both dimensions of growth are interrelated, they are neither synonymous as terms nor fused as processes. Models for psychological growth cannot be superimposed onto spiritual growth because of some significant differences in the way in which self-awareness, spirit, and self-transcendence are defined and used by psychology and theology. It follows that psychotherapy and spiritual direction make unique contributions to human growth and need not be perceived as synonymous or competitive. There is a point at which psyche and spirit, psychotherapy and spiritual direction, meet: the place of healing.     

SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION,RITUAL HEALING,AND ALTRUISM

Based on studies of spirit healing in Puerto Rico and the United States, this essay proposes a model of ritual healing process focused on the core components of spiritual transformation and empathy. It describes the central role of spiritual transformation in healers from which emerges their capacity for relation, empathy, and altruism. Many spirit healers, following a spiritual transformation, begin to exercise what I label here radical empathy, in which individual differences between healer and sufferer are melded into one field of feeling and experience. This produces a type of altruism in which spirit healers feel compelled to be altruistic in responding to suffering whenever they encounter it. The model is compared and contrasted with aspects of healing process in some psychotherapeutic and analytic therapies. These comparisons are offered in the light of the growing interest in incorporating spirituality into psychological and medical treatments.     

Jung's Breath-Body and African Spiritual Healing

Psychology essentially refers to the study and use (logos) of the breath, soul or spirit of life (psyche) that leaves a person at death and continues in some other form. From such a fundamental perspective, all forms of ancient and modern caring, helping and healing have their foundations in breath-based behaviour, experiences and spirituality. This article examines Jung's image of the breath-body or spirit-body in relation to various spiritual healing traditions with special focus on their source in African spiritual healing.     

Holistic Psychology: A Brief Primer

This article explicates the foundations, essential themes and healing principles of holistic psychology; an approach which provides a corrective for such trends in modern scientific psychology as disciplinary perspectives, the overemphasis on the economics and politics of professionalism. Holistic psychology emphasizes spiritual healing, multi-cultural counseling, community and ecological interventions. Its core pillars of practice and care stem from the spiritual and wisdom traditions widely applicable to combating illness, injustice, violence, materialism, and technocratic influences so prevalent in contemporary society. As a breath and/or spirit based healing practice, holistic psychology provides a foundational exercise for personal, social and cosmic transformation.     

Children with Asthma and Their Families’ Viewpoints on Spiritual and Psychological Resources in Adaptation with the Disease

Recognition of the spiritual and psychological needs of children and their families with chronic asthma disease may be helpful in a successful coping with their problems in order to control over the condition. In a qualitative content analysis study, nine children with moderate to severe asthma and 10 parents were studied in order to discover the resources of compatibility of them. The participants were chosen purposefully and they were asked some semi-structure questions about their experiences. The spiritual and psychological experiences of the participants were divided into two main categories as follows: (1) contrive to religious-belief consisting of three sub-categories known as “religious rituals, believe in a divine predestination, and Islamic-based patience,” and (2) psycho-intellectual management that includes the five sub-categories of “psycho-intellectual attention, maintaining family’s mental peace, reduction in negative burden of disease, satisfaction from optimal treatment, and matching internal desires with disease conditions.” It is recommended that heath care providers by reinforcing parent’s and children’s religious and spiritual backgrounds and according to child’s cognitive development at this age provide a suitable foreground through necessary instructions for children and their families in order to spiritual growth and suitable adaptation with disease.     

Reasoning matters: Transrational traits of healing in competing medical epistemes in Botswana

The WHO suggests integrating traditional health practices into national public health systems. However, cooperation between both systems of healing seldom works. Traditional healing practices often attract accusations of irrationality and mysticism. From a scientific point of view, inferences based on spirituality are not considered as having the same significance as those drawing on rational thinking. However, spiritual intuition is in line with abductive reasoning, which is a core element across all systems of thinking and central to the development of new hypotheses in the sciences. Traditional healing practices in Botswana serve to present the notion of transrationality, which appreciates the specific character of spiritual healing and thus may aid in establishing better cooperation between traditional and modern health practitioners.     

Archetypes and Spirits: A Jungian Analysis of Puerto Rican Espiritismo

In this paper a comparison is made between Jung's approach to healing with a traditional healing system practised in Puerto Rico, called ‘Espiritismo’. Jungian psychology and ‘Espiritismo’ have several strong similarities in their conception of the therapeutic process, similarities which suggest that the healing process itself has generic properties which can be found in several therapeutic systems. In addition, by analysing Jung's development as a healer, it is possible to draw parallels between his development as a psychotherapist and the process of becoming a spiritist healer. In both healing systems, a transpersonal dimension is recognized as an integral element in the healing process. In ‘Espiritismo’, the suffering individual has to confront the spirit world; in analytical psychotherapy the patient has to confront the collective unconscious. This parallel was explicitly recognized by Jung in his autobiography when he compared the collective unconscious with the land of the dead. For Jung, knowledge of the figures of the unconscious enormously facilitates the individuation process; in ‘Espiritismo’ it is necessary to know the spirit world and to establish a relationship with the spirits. In Jungian psychology, healing is a process of ‘exorcizing’ some types of complexes or integrating others to consciousness. On the other hand, spiritist healers ‘exorcize’ ignorant spirits in order to heal a client or help him/her to identify spirit guides. In both systems, healing is essentially a process of establishing a dialogue with a transpersonal dimension (archetypes or spirits). Healing in ‘Espiritismo’ and Jungian psychology is a process of transcending the limited perspective of the ego (the ‘material world’) in order to experience a much broader reality (spiritual world or collective unconscious). Both systems emphasize the need to work with resources beyond the boundaries of the ego and to connect with forces that belong to a different reality.     

SPIRIT HEALING,MENTAL HEALTH,AND EMOTION REGULATION

Abstract. Spirit healing is widespread across societies in diverse world regions. Its ritual forms appear in local, popular religions as well as a variety of organized churches. Although aspects of ritual, suchas the identification of spirits and use of symbols and paraphernalia, vary with culture and type of religion, there appear to be basic components of ritual healing process shared by its diverse forms. Using data on Spiritist healing in Puerto Rico as a case example, I first examine aspects of the interface between mental illness as defined by psychiatry and spirit healing. I then raise the question: If spirit healing is effective with some emotional disorders (as I have discussed in previous reports), how does it work? Emotional transactions could be considered foundational to most or all spirit healing rituals as they are to some psychotherapeutic and alternative‐medicine modalities. One model of emotion regulation is proposed as a lens through which to view specific processes of change in feelings and emotions in the context of culturally specified ritual structures.     

Spiritual development: understanding and importance in schools: an analysis based on statements made by school directors from Valparaíso,Chile

Chile’s General Law of Education states that one of the purposes of education is the spiritual development of all its schooled population. Furthermore, guidelines in Chile’s education system place school directors as key players in student’s learning. This article presents the results of a research involving school directors from Valparaíso, Chile. The aim of this research was to identify how directors of secular and religious schools understand their students’ spiritual development. We studied this aspect in particular through semi-structured interviews conducted with 20 participants. Results show that directors understand spirituality as a typically human ability that can be strengthened in schools and, thus, they believe it to be highly important in schools. In addition, they see a strong relation between spiritual development and ethical and moral development. This study also shows differences in how secular and religious schools’ directors understand this relation. This opens the way for more in-depth analysis regarding spiritual development in Chile’s education system, especially considering that directors generally believe it to be a part of a holistic and quality education.     

Divine Appetites: Food Miracles,Authority and Religious Identities in the Gujarati Hindu Diaspora

Research of the Gujarati Hindu communities of the United Kingdom and New Zealand has uncovered an extraordinary diversity of belief concerning the miraculous consumption of devotional food offerings by murtis. Devotees of certain traditions have experienced these events first-hand, but many Hindus believe the process is more subtle. Others suggest that such claims are attempts to gain spiritual authority among Hindus in the diaspora, some dismiss them as simply fraudulent. This article examines the appetite of the divine and how it is understood and contested by various Gujarati Hindu traditions in the United Kingdom and in New Zealand. It will assess the significance of food miracles and how they strengthen ideas of religious identity and spiritual validity as well as their role creating a palpable tension between traditions as to who authoritatively represents Hinduism in the diaspora.     

What Do the Spiritual and Religious Traditions Offer the Practicing Psychologist?

There has been a remarkable amount of interest in the relationship among spirituality, religion, psychology, and health of late. Contemporary interest in spirituality and religion is hot among not only the general population but among professionals in the mental and physical health disciplines. While most people believe in God and consider themselves to be spiritual, religious, or both, most mental health professionals have little if any training in this area. Psychologists can use spiritual and religious principles and tools to better serve their clients even if they do not share the same religious interests. The purpose of this article is to offer thirteen spiritual and religious tools common among all of the major religious traditions that can be used by contemporary professional psychologists in clinical practice to enhance the already high quality professional services that they provide. Examples of spiritually and religiously integrated treatment along with several ethical precautions are noted as well. This article is based on book project by Plante currently in press.     

Changing and diverse roles of women in American Indian cultures

This article explores traditional and contemporary sex roles of Indian women. It emphasizes the renewing power of the feminine—a creative, healing balance that arises as traditional and contemporary strengths are brought together. The survival of the extended family throughout two hundred years of governmental policy attests to Indian women's resilience despite continuous role readjustment, value conflict, and economic pressure. Tribal diversity and predominantly egalitarian structural similarities are affirmed in this work through reviews of ethnographic studies addressing the roles of Indian women prior to European contact. The conventional and alternative roles of Indian women in traditional times are examined with an eye toward the spiritual source of Indian women's strength. Studies outlining the emotional and spiritual costs of contemporary Indian women living bicultural lifestyles, especially those pursuing advanced educational training, highlight the continued use of traditional Indian coping mechanisms. Finally, the current movement toward retraditionalization of roles of Indian women as caretakers and transmitters of cultural knowledge is posited as an effective means of overcoming problems and achieving Indian self-determination.We would like to thank Myra Strober and Janet Sorrel for their helpful comments concerning earlier versions of this article.     

Talking of God and Talking of Fairies: Discourses of spiritual development in the works of George MacDonald and in the curriculum

By law schools in England and Wales are required to promote the spiritual development of their pupils and school inspectors must report on how well they do so. This is a very recent local legislative enactment of a timeless and universal concern. A spiritual dimension to human life, however resistant to definition or measurement, has been recognized for as long as men and women have consciously reflected on their condition. The determination to seek the spiritual well-being of the young antedates the trial of Socrates and the writing of the book of Proverbs. Obvious as it is, this point does need to be made. It could be supposed from much of the discussion in educational circles that interest in spiritual development was unknown before the 1944 Education Act. That said, there are questions to be asked about the education of the spirit which, if not new, acquire an immediacy from the social and cultural conditions specific to our time and from the requirements of current educational legislation. To one question in particular today's debate about spiritual development as a curricular requirement continually returns. It is whether a coherent spirituality requires the support of a religious tradition. Students in our schools come from a diversity of religious backgrounds. At the same time--and often at the same school--many come from homes which long ago took leave of God. What is to be the relationship in such schools between the spiritual development which they are statutorily obliged to promote and traditional religious world-views whether these are still devoutly followed or long abandoned? Do notions of spirituality and spiritual development have any coherence without secure anchorage in a religious tradition with it specific truth-claims? In this article I shall argue that, while clearly spiritual education can be based on the claims of a religious tradition, such a confessional framework is not necessary for the concept of spiritual education to be coherent and for its implementation within the curriculum to be possible. There is, in a word, a spirituality without religion. In developing this argument I shall appeal to a Victorian writer of fairy tales, George MacDonald, whom we shall meet a little later.     

I. R. Owen. Psychotherapy and Phenomenology. New York: iUniverse,Inc.

Abstract

This study¹ explores the experience of the body for contemporary female mystics. It is an exploration in how women mystics of today—those who have devoted most of their lifetime to prayer, meditation, and spiritual service—make sense of the body. What is the relationship between spirit and body, God and flesh, for such women? Is it a relationship of tension or even opposition, and how does it evolve over time? These are some of the questions that guided my investigation. The impulse to understand how the body is experienced and understood by such women was felt by me as both a longing to challenge, deepen, and refine my awareness and understanding of spirit and the body, specifically for women mystics. I also felt this as a burning in the heart, an urgent desire to connect and bridge the larger world of matter and that of spirit, to inquire into that dimension where flesh and spirit are not two, but one. I believe that this impulse to understand the relationship between body and spirit is both personal and quite possibly collective. My hope is that this research will serve as one step to further our collective understanding of human embodiment.     

Cultural Issues in Psychopharmacology: Integrating Medication Treatment with Lakota Sioux Traditions

Psychologists may soon be entering into the practice of pharmacologic treatment of mental illness. Although there has been some investigation of biologic differences in drug response among various ethnic and racial groups, very little attention has been paid to the nonbiologic differences. Cultural definitions of health, healing, and illness and specific cultural practices are likely to have a significant impact on various aspects of treatment, compliance, and interaction effects. This article addresses the issue of culture and the impact of cultural practices on the use of psychotropic medications with the Lakota (Sioux) people of the Northern Plains. Specific examples of traditional Lakota ceremonies and their potential interactions with psychotropic medications are presented with recommendations to prescribers for handling these situations in a culturally responsive manner. Emphasis is placed on creating collaborative relationships between prescribers and traditional spiritual healers in the care of Native American clients. Recommendations for future research are discussed.     

The Spiritual Implications of Interpersonal Abuse: Speaking of the Soul

A holistic view of the person includes body, mind and spirit, or soul. The purpose of this paper is to explore the concepts of “soul” and “radical evil” within a conversation about destructive interpersonal abuse. Most religions and spiritual disciplines understand the human person, especially the human soul, as sacred. When the perpetrator, propelled by his own internal alienation, desecrates the soul of his victim through relational sexual abuse, the victim often experiences herself as a no-person. Her ongoing sense of identity is fragmented, her capacity for spiritual experience, for imagination, creativity, relatedness are deeply wounded. With the help of information from the field of neuroscience, as well as other theological perspectives, some pathways for healing of the soul are discussed.     

A New Theological Anthropology for Developing Resiliency and Healing from Combat*

Moral injury is a complex wound of the soul affecting many veterans returning from combat. This article will propose that a blended theological anthropology, which incorporates Irenaeus’s understanding of spiritual growth and Augustine’s focus on individual accountability and sin, will better foster healing and growth from morally traumatic experiences. In order to do so, I will introduce elements of the psychological paradigm of posttraumatic growth with a theological anthropology I develop in order to propose a mindset which I believe will increase resiliency to the morally challenging environment of combat.     

The Influence of Christian Conversion in Mapuche Traditional Medicine in Temuco, Chile: Toward a Cultural Syncretism or a form of Ideological Assimilation?

The Mapuche communities living in the urban areas of Chile have undergone radical cultural changes due to Christian conversion. This article analyzes the influence of these changes on the Mapuche ideas and practices of the traditional healers (machi) and patients in Temuco (IX Region), Chile, and the changes and adaptations in the perceptions of healing practices and rituals by the patients. The paper shows how, despite some evident challenges, the encounter with the religion of Christianity can create a process of cultural and spiritual syncretism and push traditional medicine toward an increased specialization in the therapeutic practices.     

SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION,HEALING, AND ALTRUISM: INTRODUCTION TO THE SYMPOSIUM

This essay introduces the five articles that follow, whose aim is to show how altruism emerges out of spiritual transformation and is integral to healing process in four kinds of ritual healing systems—popular, folk, an indigenous religious healing tradition, and complementary and alternative medicine represented by consciousness transformation movements. In this introduction I situate these largely marginalized religious and spiritual practices within the context of the religion‐science discourse, which has focused for the most part on the relationship between the established, mainstream religions and the dominant biomedical system. Antecedents of two of these types of religious practices, Spiritism and consciousness transformation movements, were part of the development of the psychological sciences in the nineteenth century but lost ground in the twentieth. Despite discrimination and persistent negative attitudes on the part of the established religions and biomedicine, these healing traditions have not only survived through the twentieth century but appear to have gained both followers and interest in the twenty‐first. In future decades, at least for complementary and alternative medical practices and perhaps also for spirit healing centers, there may be a reversal in status through greater acceptance of their unique combination of scientific and religious perspectives.     

Moral injury and the priesthood of all believers1

This article proceeds from the conviction that moral injury suffered by many combat veterans is a deeply spiritual matter requiring spiritual resources for healing. The tradition of the care of souls commends itself. It takes into account that the “soul” is an expression of the whole person in all its physical, spiritual, and social realities. Moral injury affects all those dimensions of personhood or soul. Since the Reformation the care of souls has been a vocation for the ministry of the whole people of God under the theology of the priesthood of all believers. A caring community is essential to healing for many dealing with moral injury. Indeed, the veterans themselves, in sharing their stories and their pain, become part of that ministry of the priesthood of all believers and may well find healing in the meaningfulness of their mutual ministry.