The Spiritual Psyche in Psychotherapy

Mysticism, Intersubjectivity, and Psychoanalysis

Willow Pearson, Helen Marlo, Willow Pearson, Helen Marlo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000214932
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

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, Kabbalah, 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.

Chapter 1

Inhabiting the spiritual psyche

Willow Pearson and Helen Marlo

We met at Helen’s newly relocated office for the interview. Helen took time out between patients to engage in the conversation. Her office was softly lit in muted warmth. Herbert Draper’s painting A Water Baby, with its motifs of birth, connection, wonder and opening, hangs on one wall. Settling into her comfortable couch, across from her chair, I also viewed Hieronymus Bosch’s enigmatic Garden of Earthly Delights, musing on its depiction of the human experience and the interconnections between body, soul and spirit. I immediately felt a sense of inner calm and peace, as I eased myself into her receptive company. I was struck by a sense of being released from the daily tumult of life into the quiet reflection of the spirit, aided by Helen’s welcoming, kind and open demeanor in her office space, which can best be described as a sanctuary of the soul.

Willow: I’m delighted to have the opportunity to interview you about the spiritual psyche.

I want to dive right in with this question for you. The spiritual psyche is perhaps a fraught term, as it can connote that there’s a spiritual psyche distinguished from the ground of psyche itself. And we know that this is not the case, that rather, we mean to connote that psyche is always and already spiritual in nature. It’s only that when we awaken to this living, pulsing reality that is who we truly are.

Robin Bagai has anchored our consideration saying, in essence, that psyche as a form of spirit is neither measurable nor ultimately definable. Such qualities add to psyche’s value by leaving it open to commune with realms of the unknown, the possible and the infinite, where creative imagination is born. Mitchel Becker, in “Allowing the Creation,” has poetically expressed,

There is no spiritual psyche. / There is the spiriting of the psyche. / It is neither an entity, nor a place nor even a state. / It’s a movement of psychic spiriting in which one seeks to have an encounter with truth.

(p. 279)

Drawing on these contemplative expressions of paradox in approaching psyche and spirit, could you describe what you mean by inhabiting the ever-present spiritual psyche?

Helen: I appreciate both their insights and perspectives. Their comments reflect how challenging it is to describe the spiritual psyche in words and in a differentiated way. However, as limited as words are, they are starting points that express our contemplations! I would say there is no spiritual psyche, and there is only the spiritual psyche.

I am pulled to use the term spiritual psyche especially when considering current cultural movements in our field, which has long fought for scientific legitimacy, most recently exemplified in privileging “evidence-based” approaches to psychology. The spiritual dimension can get excluded or minimized because it escapes assessment by constructs or methods that are considered evidence-based, even while the spiritual dimension, itself, may be quite empirical! Maybe we need to explicitly name the spiritual psyche in the current zeitgeist because it has been so marginalized by approaches that privilege quantifiable phenomena that defy measurement.

This term doesn’t fit either with the cultural emphasis on pragmatism, solutions and progress, since it fails to offer quick and easy ideas, tools or strategies. Naming it as the spiritual psyche feels like an important corrective for our culture, since mainstream psychology has marginalized that part of the human experience. The act of naming something can be powerful. The word psyche means soul and spirit. Saying spiritual psyche should really be considered redundant, rather than fraught since spiritual names its essence.

Willow: Absolutely.

Helen: At the core, for me, inhabiting the spiritual psyche refers to embodying an attitude toward living life and doing this work that is ultimately rooted in a faithful and respectful belief in the power and permutations of spirit. Spirit is real and is all there is ultimately: The lifeblood of the psyche. The other dimensions of life exist and really matter, too—it’s not an either/or—but spirit is what ultimately influences, remains and can be everlasting. It inhabits us during an experience and remains long after the experience or relationship is over. If we don’t have some connection with that spirit and soul level, I think we miss the psyche’s essence. I think inhabiting the spiritual psyche means going through life with spirit as a primary value, as a primary mode of listening, appreciating, engaging and relating.

Willow: That sounds quite important. Beautiful. Thank you.

Part of inhabiting the spiritual psyche is forging a relationship to the mystical—the mystery, that which is yet unknown and unknowable. Mysticism has been described as both ineffable, owing to the inability to capture the experience in ordinary language, and as having a noetic quality. Mystical experiences reveal hidden or inaccessible knowledge. Given these ineffable and noetic qualities of the mystical, how would you describe the process and value of attending to mystical experience in life, psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy?

Helen: Some dimension of what’s called mystical experience is about that daily, dynamic work of consciousness—being engaged in that mysterious relationship with the unconscious, including, and especially for mystic experience, the collective and transpersonal levels. I don’t believe it only happens to special people or the so-called mystics because it’s available to everybody—that is the nature of spirit: It is for all to receive and give if they open to it. I do think the more one exists with consciousness and is devoted to cultivating consciousness—which is vastly different from knowledge—the more spiritual phenomena emerge and may manifest. I think it is correlated with how related one is to consciousness. Somebody who comes to see me may not be able to take in a wider swath of consciousness. They may need to be very narrowly focused on a presenting problem, symptom or issue. That doesn’t mean I can’t work more widely. They may not be ready to relate to a spiritual dimension yet, or ever, but that doesn’t mean it does not exist. They are just not related to that part of consciousness. I will hold and work with these unconscious parts with and for them.

Others may come in and be very connected to spirit or to a spiritual way of being, and then the analytic container can be experienced differently. They might be holding one dimension of spirit, and I might be holding a different dimension. We might be holding parallel or complementary dimensions. When we talk about the spiritual, we’re partially talking about the part of the psyche that makes the psyche pulse. That attention is part of the work of awareness to levels of consciousness. Sometimes, I’m right there, and other days I miss it, because that’s how consciousness works. But if you don’t commit to being in relationship with the spiritual dimensions of psyche and if you don’t believe that this is part of life, then it will not be a conscious part of life. This is a part of the psyche that can be cultivated through psychotherapy or psychoanalysis over time—as well as through a variety of other paths. It is capable of growth and development.

Part of our work as practitioners who value the spiritual psyche is to hold and be with that spiritual level, regardless of how much others do or do not consciously engage with the spiritual dimension of life. People who experience psychological approaches that don’t consider this spiritual dimension of life often leave the therapeutic work or never develop certain aspects of themselves; they remain less conscious and encounter limits. For me, the work of being a psychotherapist, psychologist and psychoanalyst is fostering and developing a human’s potential and development as a person. I will embody and work from that larger stance whether or not the person does. I have to have that developed enough in myself.

Of course, that is a limitless goal—one that I easily fall short on—but I don’t know how someone works in any depthful way with another human being without a deep, profound respect for this spiritual energy of consciousness and what it can do. I think you just need to work clinically long enough to hear how mystical things happen—how inexplicable things happen, that defy what the evidence may predict. Categorizing, diagnosing and applying formulaic and circumscribed treatments can be sanctioned as good evidence-based clinical practice. It is understandable that the very professionals entrusted to work with the psyche will sometimes stop from understanding and engaging with these irrationalities that fail to conform to categories, diagnoses and formulaic treatments. That said, this appreciation for the irrational lives side by side with an appreciation for the rational, known, predictable and proven. Living with this tension is part of living a spiritual life. The concrete and the spiritual are bedfellows. If you can be open enough to engage with both, you will encounter and develop a connection to the mystical.

Willow: I hear you saying that to attend to the mystical dimension of life is to attend to our full human potential. Attending to this level deepens our work as psychotherapists, psychologists and psychoanalysts because you are paying attention to how you can support another human being reach their full potential or expand it further. And I also hear you saying that traveling those paths within one’s self is the foundational enterprise for being able to hold a container of exploration for that with another.

Helen: Absolutely. I think the path is one of cultivating that receptivity rather than immediately going to a place of preconceived knowing and critical analysis. Some mental health professionals can be very judgmental and critical. That is really sad. It is easy to get hard. We encounter so much hatred, cruelty, pathology and suffering, and it is natural to contract and get judgmental in these situations. We can curb that tendency if we accept the ugliness and embrace that we don’t understand—that we don’t know all that influences a human’s experience—if we admit that there’s a lot that we just can’t explain, that defies categorization. To commit to engaging and relating to the inexplicable feels like a much more spiritual attitude. At times, of course, we have to make a judgment that something, categorically, is psychopathology or mental illness—that may be the most humane and spiritual response. Even if it is, that doesn’t completely address the person’s experience. Some in our field have lost the psyche part: A respect and attention for the human experience. I get referrals from people who say, “I was referred to you because I had this unbelievable experience that sounds crazy.” I am not necessarily talking about people with some diagnosable and evident form of mental illness who aren’t functioning in the world. And notwithstanding, people with a diagnosis or mental illness, and those who may not be functioning so well, also have just as valid a story to tell. If they’re not functioning well, then their story gets relegated even more as irrelevant. Stories get dismissed if the person is not functioning. The people whom I’ve worked with who struggle to function on this planet often do, or did, have a deeply spiritually alive world, which is or was just as real. Unfortunately, their functional limitations can result in their spiritual life being disparaged.

Willow: To add to that, mysticism has been characterized by a unity of opposites, oneness, wholeness, completeness and timelessness. And also includes contact with the true self. That is, mystical experiences reveal the nature of our true self beyond life and death, beyond difference and duality and beyond ego and selfishness. Wilfred Bion talked about the mystical vertex, and Carl Jung talked about a religious instinct. In what ways does the mystical dimension present itself in your experience of psychoanalytic practice? Is there an example that comes to mind?

Helen: Sure. To give you an example: I have here this container of moon symbols [shows a small collection of objects that are moon shaped or that symbolize the moon]. I got a call from a parent whose child had been tragically killed. The whole grieving family came in for an initial crisis session. The parents were very grounded but also had a deeply spiritual worldview that partially manifested in their professional lives. The child who died had spiritual interests and had been very connected to that part of life sin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Author biographies
• Acknowledgments
• Editors’ introduction
• 1 Inhabiting the spiritual psyche
• 2 Letting the light get in
• 3 Thoughts on mystery, paradox and doubleness
• 4 Depth psychotherapy and spiritual inquiry: Jungian and transpersonal perspectives
• 5 Soul home: the Kabbalah dance and Jungian psychoanalysis
• 6 Reckoning with the spiritual truth of aversive emotions: evolving unconditional positive regard and discovering the good enough clinician
• 7 Surviving through destruction: reading Gandhi in Winnicott
• 8 Out of dissociation into creation through relation: a depth-oriented and Jungian perspective on psychological and spiritual experience
• 9 Caesuras of dreaming: being and becoming, thinking and imagining
• 10 Allowing the creation
• Index