THE INTERPLAY OF PSYCHOLOGY AND SPIRITUALITY

A debut manual for counselors and therapists grapples with spirituality issues.

Based on her 26-year career as a grief and life transitions counselor and therapist, Hepburn offers advice to those in the helping professions who encounter challenging patient problems involving spirituality. Many science-based practitioners have a difficult time evaluating spiritual visions, near-death experiences, and other extraordinary events patients sometimes bring to therapy. Discussing Jung, contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber, mindfulness teachers Jack Kornfield, and Stan Grof, and many authorities in various spiritual traditions, the author employs personality typologies based on the ancient Enneagram and ideas about individuation in her wide-ranging guide. Written in a sophisticated and trenchant style, this book weaves together crucial concepts and practices that support a deep engagement with a provocative subject often dismissed in much professional literature as myth or nonsense. “How can we understand the relationship between these two approaches to personality differences?” the author asks in examining Jung’s emphasis on wholeness by dealing with psychological opposites and the Enneagram’s transformational unveiling of different personality layers. This book attempts to answer this and many other thorny and complex questions involving psychology and spirituality. Replete with useful charts, graphs, and images, this resource for practitioners does not shy away from extensively exploring not only the rewards of spiritual journeys, but also the dangerous pitfalls, self-deceptions, and delusions emerging from those odysseys. Hepburn addresses all of this with admirable detail, clarity, and honesty.

A psychologist delivers an insightful and thorough guide to coping with patients’ spiritual journeys.