Mental health revisits spirituality and religion
Religion and spirituality have generally received little favorable attention from psychiatrists and clinical psychologists. That clinical psychologists in particular have as a group a very low level of religiosity is a well known quirk in the field. But there are now signs that religion and spirituality are being given a second reading by mental health clinicians. There have always been exceptions such as Carl Jung, whose turn to religious history and mythology led to his analytical psychology being called at times a religious psychology. However, the reconsideration of religion and spirituality in the mental health field owes perhaps less to figures such as Carl Jung and more to the increasing sensitivity to multiculturalism in the clinical community. A primary figure in the unfavorable view of religion and spirituality is the psychoanalytic movement. Fueled by the Freudian claim that religion is a form of wish fulfillment, psychoanalysis has a very long history of either ignoring sp...
