Spirituality in Psychotherapy

This fascinating book based on interviews with Western European psychotherapists discusses how they understand, navigate, experience and integrate spirituality in their professional encounters with clients. The study takes a post-modern and social constructivist viewpoint that conveys 'an open, fluid and nonreligious spirituality integrating different perspectives and traditions.' The findings suggest an understanding of spirituality as a valid construct independent from religion within a broadly nonmaterialistic scientific paradigm that accepts personal experiences as a genuine source of spiritual knowledge. The approach is comprehensive and systematic, taking what the author calls a 'bricolage' approach to qualitative enquiry that challenges academic limitations, including the exclusion of Jung from academia and taking into account the findings of the Galileo Commission.

The author develops Crotty's research model that takes into account ontology, epistemology and theoretical perspectives to generate a corresponding qualitative methodology and research methods. This is developed into ten lines of enquiry that form the basis of interviews that also address the evolution of the therapists' own views in the encounter with the spiritual experiences of clients. This necessarily impinges on the therapist's own spirituality and personal practice. The findings indicate a similarity of views across a range of backgrounds along with a nondogmatic and non-pathologising clinical attitude. There seems to be a lack professional networks in this field, and interviewees also felt constricted by various kinds of dogma. All this is elaborated in the detail of the interviews. At the end of the study, the author makes a number of suggestions involving openness and attentiveness to the personal experiences and spiritual development of clients while remaining present and addressing issues arising in a creative and flexible manner. The book will be of special interest to transpersonal psychotherapists as a reflective mirror in their own practices.