PY 565 - Psychotherapy and Spirituality

This course explores the relationship between psychotherapy and spirituality, including the historical, phenomenological, multicultural, and clinical expressions of various relationships between these two disciplines or practices. Throughout the course we will explore common clinical issues and interventions that arise in therapeutic encounters related to spirituality, including the loss of meaning in life, the problem of evil, spiritual emergency and/or transformation, the search for hope, the relationship of morality and spirituality, conversion, mystical experience, death and the afterlife, guilt and forgiveness, spiritual community and intimacy, the relationship between consciousness and spirituality, the use of ritual, meditation, mindfulness, and prayer in treatment, the significance of religious language, the discernment of healthy and pathological forms of spirituality, and psychotherapy as spiritual discipline, among other topics. Lastly, we will explore the notion of homo spiritus, or an understanding of the human being as inherently spiritual, and the relationship of this perspective to the original understanding of the psychologist as an iatros tes psyche, or "physician of the soul." (2 credits)

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