Authors: Lionel Corbett
ISBN-13: 9780415144018, ISBN-10: 0415144019
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Taylor & Francis, Inc.
Date Published: September 1996
Edition: New Edition
Traditional concepts of God are no longer tenable for many people who nevertheless experience a strong sense of the sacred. These people require an approach to religion that recognizes its actual manifestations within their own lives. The Religious Function of the Psyche offers a psychological model for the understanding of such experience, using the language and interpretive methods of depth psychology, particularly those of psychoanalytic self psychology. Offering an introduction to Jung and religion and a bridge between the transpersonal and the personal levels of the psyche, author Lionel Corbett suggests a psychological model for the relationship between the divine and the human and offers an alternative approach to spirituality. The problems of evil and suffering, and the notion of human development as an incarnation of spirit are dealt with by means of a religious approach to the psyche that can be brought easily into psychotherapeutic practice and applied by the individual in everyday life.
List of figures | ||
Acknowledgements | ||
Introduction: The new psychological dispensation | 1 | |
1 | The Religious Attitude in Psychotherapy | 5 |
2 | Personal Spirituality Based on Contact with the Numinosum | 11 |
3 | The Transpersonal Self: A psychological approach to the divine | 39 |
4 | The Archetype as Synthetic Principle: Making psychology and spirituality synonymous | 57 |
5 | Mythical, Symbolic and Imaginal Aspects of the Psyche's Religious Function | 84 |
6 | A Psychological View of Some Traditional Religious Ideas | 105 |
7 | A Depth Psychological Approach to the Problem of Suffering | 126 |
8 | Suffering: The search for meaning | 152 |
9 | Sin and Evil: A psychological approach | 185 |
10 | Psychotherapy and Spiritual Practice | 204 |
11 | The Rationale for a Contemplative Psychology | 220 |
Appendix | 229 | |
Notes | 240 | |
References | 246 | |
Index | 252 |