You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Margaret Clark has already contributed to this series of monographs on clinical practice with her well received book, Understanding the Self-Ego Relationship in Clinical Practice: Towards Individuation . Now her Understanding Religion and Spirituality in Clinical Practice for the same series is designed to help trainees on psychotherapy and psychodynamic counselling courses to make sense of the ‘psychodynamic “Tower of Babel” encountered as they embark on training’ (p. ix). By design, volumes in this series are kept relatively brief, with the aim of bringing together ‘some major theorists and their ideas in a comprehensible way, including references to significant and interesting texts’ (p. ix). A key subtext of the series is to demonstrate ways in which psychoanalytic and Jungian analytic ideas can be integrated. Given this important but restricted brief, Clark has fulfilled her task well.
In the Introduction, Clark explains her use of terms like ‘spirituality’, ‘religion’, and ‘God’. She also makes the thought-provoking point that, in most psychotherapy and counselling training courses, no time is devoted to an exploration of these topics. She notes: ‘It is rare for any trainee to be asked to examine, or understand, their own spiritual standpoint. It is even more rare for them to be required to consider that this, whatever it is, is relative and not absolute’ (p. xiii).
In a sobering passage, she recalls one ‘unfortunate participant’ in a workshop she led, who reported that ‘her supervisor considered her patient's material about religion as neurotic, irrelevant, or delusional, and would not discuss it in supervision’ (p. xiii). ‘Presumably’, she comments, ‘the supervisor's own training therapist had not taken his feelings about religion and spirituality any more seriously’ (p. xii). The point is well made.
The eight chapter headings give a good idea of the contents of the book: 1. ‘The legacy of Freud on Religion’, 2. ‘Jung: the Symbolic and the Arcane’, 3. ‘The Crea