Exploring Sacred Landscapes

Exploring Sacred Landscapes offers mental health practitioners both a motivation and a rationale for taking into account the importance of spiritual struggle and religious experience in the lives of their patients.The six clinicians contributing to this volume provide an intimate look at the therapeutic process in which manifestations of the spiritual and the religious are used to understand and further that process. Drawing primarily on psychoanalytic theories but also including a Jungian perspective and a structural stage development view, these clinicians trace the developmental course of therapy, discuss their theoretical orientation, present their therapeutic interventions, and describe the nature of transference and countertransference reactions.Each detailed clinical case study includes a section that orients readers to the significance and impact of religion in the course of treatment.With its careful examination of the clinical process - how religious and spiritual strivings are manifested, the nuances of therapeutic intervention - this book builds an important bridge between clinical theory and practice.