The application of Analytical Psychology’s approach to religion and spirituality to mainstream counselling and psychotherapy, focusing on Person Centred counselling. (Masters essay. April 2021).
Introduction
This essay is about the treatment of religion and spirituality within mainstream counselling and psychotherapy. Arguing that there are gaps and areas of weakness within contemporary counselling and psychotherapeutic approaches to working with the religious and spiritual issues of clients, I explore whether the approach of Analytical Psychology has the potential to be usefully applied.
Seventeen years ago, aged forty, and unhappy with a career in the corporate world, I left and retrained as a Person Centred counsellor. I subsequently trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Mindfulness, as well as supervision, and have worked in private practice ever since. At about the same time, I also became more interested in spirituality and discovered Buddhism which I have studied and practiced intermittently during the same period. Thus, psychotherapy along with religion and spirituality, have been important themes running through the last two decades of my life.
My interest in Jung began about four years ago. Shortly after, I also commenced weekly Jungian analysis which lasted for 12 months and involved, amongst other things, an exploration of my spiritual life as, at the time, I was contemplating whether to leave Buddhism. This was my first experience of Jungian analysis and I found it to be insightful and helpful in ways which I had not encountered in other types of therapy, leading me to make several changes in my relationship with spirituality, including my withdrawal from Buddhism.
Having had first-hand, positive experience with the Jungian approach, I then started to re-evaluate the way in which I worked myself, as a Person Centred therapist, with the religious and spiritual concerns of my clients.
Over the years, the frequency with which clients had brought issues of spirituality and religion to sessions had shown me that this was an important concern for many. The desperate young woman, for example, who wished to exit the Jehovah’s Witness cult within which she had been raised; the achingly lonely Catholic priest who would regularly bring his powerful dreams and his own sacred poetry to sessions; the staunch Christian and regular churchgoer with a secret gambling addiction and the wife of a strict Muslim man who, feeling repressed by both her husband and his religion, eventually built up the resolve to leave them both, are to name but a few. And, on the other side of the same coin, was the ardent atheist, a scientist with a formidably rational and logical mind who, being dissociated from his feelings, was struggling to live a meaningful life, and the self-declared secular humanist perplexed about her dreams which contained undeniable, as well as very powerful, religious symbolism. Less overt, but just as significant, were those many middle-aged clients vaguely dissatisfied with life, struggling with low motivation and seeking new purpose and meaning. The spiritual yearnings of midlife, as I had discovered myself in my late thirties, is an important theme within Analytical Psychology. ‘Among all my patients in the second half of life’ Jung said ‘… there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life’ (CW 11: 509).
I was left wondering as to how, up until now, I had handled the religious and spiritual concerns of my clients and, more importantly, what had been their experiences? And, as I questioned my own therapeutic approach towards religion and spirituality, what was certain was that I was learning a great deal from Analytical Psychology and was intrigued as to whether the Jungian approach could be used to inform my work.
I was also perplexed by the apparent absence of religion and spirituality in the world of mainstream counselling and psychotherapy and that, despite a wealth of research highlighting this, it still seemed to be largely overlooked. Within my own school of Person Centred counselling, with its roots firmly planted in humanistic and empirical soil, and the rational and scientific underpinnings of CBT, the absence of the metaphysical perhaps should not have been too surprising to me. In addition, I had a notion, largely from my supervision work, that many counsellors and psychotherapists might be insufficiently trained, or otherwise equipped, to deal with the religious or spiritual issues brought to therapy by their clients. Again, this raised further questions for me as to how clients might be left feeling if their spiritual concerns are overlooked or mishandled in therapy.
This somewhat uncertain place of religion and spirituality within mainstream counselling and psychotherapy is in stark contrast to the world of Jungian analysis, where it is treated seriously, where there is a wealth of literature and where it forms an important part of training and ongoing professional development. For Jung, religious experience is vital and working with the numinous, as he refers to it, ‘is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease’ Jung claims, ‘takes on a numinous character’ (Letters, Vol 1: 377).
In summary, through my engagement with Jung, Analytical Psychology and Jungian analysis, I have come to appreciate what for me, on a personal level, is a distinctive and helpful way of thinking about, and relating to, religion and spirituality. Now wishing to explore this on a professional level, this essay is an attempt to do so.
As already stated, my general hypothesis is that there exist gaps and weaknesses within contemporary counselling and psychotherapeutic approaches to working with the religious and spiritual concerns of clients in that, as well as being excluded, they are also prone to being mishandled by therapists. I argue that Analytical Psychology has a distinctive approach which, I suggest, could add value to psychotherapy and counselling.
Firstly, I provide a review of some of the available literature addressing the treatment of religion and spirituality in mainstream counselling and psychotherapy. I also provide a brief outline of the small number of previous attempts to introduce concepts and approaches from Analytical Psychology. Then, narrowing my focus to Person Centred counselling only, I evaluate the possibility of applying Analytical Psychology’s approach to religion and spirituality. I argue that there exists common conceptual ground which makes the incorporation of Jungian approaches possible. This includes the emphasis placed on phenomenology by both approaches, as well as the view that theory and techniques are secondary to client authority and the therapeutic relationship. I acknowledge epistemological differences, in particular the assumption of an unconscious, both personal and collective, which is central in Jungian psychology but absent in Person Centred theory. I suggest that, for those Person Centred therapists who challenge the existence of unconscious processes, acceptance of the unknown and the mysterious is sufficient. I argue that Jung’s psychological approach to religion, as well as the dual secular and religious perspective found in Analytical Psychology, are distinctive and offer new or alternative approaches to religion and spirituality for the Person Centred counsellor to consider alongside those from their own and other schools.
Based upon an open approach, I propose that, in the area of religion and spirituality, Jungian informed Person Centred therapy is possible, and my hope is that this paper contributes something to the spirit of inter-disciplinary openness, collaboration and continued dialogue.
Literature review
Throughout this essay I use the term ‘counselling and psychotherapy’ which, because there are over 400 different modalities (Feltham, 2010), is difficult to define with any precision. For the purposes of this essay, I consider the more mainstream orientations to include Humanistic, Person Centred, Existential, Transactional Analysis and Cognitive Behavioral (including third wave CBT approaches such as Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy). I also include those therapists who consider themselves to be integrative, eclectic and pluralistic in approach.
The exclusion of religion and spirituality in counselling and psychotherapy has already been comprehensively studied (see Kahle and Robbins, 2004; Clarkson, 2002). This paper is concerned less with exclusion and more with how religious and spiritual issues are handled by counsellors and psychotherapists and how clients experience this.
Some studies show that there are clients who are deterred from accessing therapy from the outset. Richards and Bergin (2004), for example, identified that conservative practitioners of Christianity, as well as other faiths, expressed fear of being judged as a significant reason preventing them from seeking secular therapists to work with. Once in therapy, clients with spiritual or religious concerns report several common experiences. Pargament and his colleagues (2005), for instance, found that spiritual issues presented by clients are often trivialised and subjected to the therapist’s values or reductionism. Jenkins (2006) found that in cases where clients felt that their spiritual concerns were excluded, abused or pathologised by their therapist, this was experienced as rejection of the person. That what was being rejected, according to one client in his study, was ‘not an optional extra but the core of who I am’ (2006: 129). Such rejection, according to Jenkins, results in the client either leaving therapy or splitting themselves and compliantly ‘playing the therapist’s game’ (2006: 127-133). In a similar vein, Sperry (2010) criticises current approaches for their reduction of spirituality to psychological constructs as well as neurological and biochemical processes. There are numerous other studies showing that experiences of feeling judged and pathologised are common, that clients view spirituality as an important aspect of therapy and an essential part of the healing process, and that therapists should be trained in handling spirituality (Ankrah, 2002; Knox et al, 2005; Rose et al, 2001).
Several studies explore ways in which spirituality can be better incorporated into counselling and psychotherapy. William West, for instance, claims his book Spiritual Issues in Therapy (2004) is an attempt to explore ‘How psychotherapy … can address the everyday aspects of human spirituality that arise for therapy clients’ and that it also ‘views the therapeutic encounter as innately and at the very least implicitly spiritual’ (2004: 11). He sets out a proposal for change to tackle his belief that ‘Counselling and psychotherapy have an ongoing problem with spirituality’ (2004: 1). As well as arguing for further research and development in theory, he stakes a claim for the inclusion of spirituality in basic counselling courses and further, more specialised training in spirituality for qualified counsellors. He also argues that ongoing, personal as well as professional, spiritual development is important so that we have counsellors and psychotherapists who are ‘Unafraid to engage in these deep levels of human experience, guided in many ways by a knowledge of her or his own deep journeying however painfully acquired’ (2004: 41).
Pargament et al (2005) propose that therapists should have a solid theoretical understanding of spirituality, an empirical approach and that they should be ecumenical in approach and willing to work with clients from different traditions. In addition, they argue that the integration of spirituality will have a deeply transformative effect on the therapeutic approach of the therapist.
Taking a different tack, Richards (2005) argues that the naturalistic, secular world view on which mainstream psychotherapy is based does not adequately account for the complexities and mysteries of life. He argues for a specifically theistic approach to therapy, in which psychotherapists take seriously the existence of external deities, to reflect the proportion of the population, especially in the West, who follow one of the major theistic religions.
Cornett’s book The soul of psychotherapy: Recapturing the spiritual dimension in the therapeutic encounter, is an attempt to address ‘the spiritual aspects of clients’ lives … in a way that is dynamically considered’ (Cornett, 1998: vii). This book has a psychodynamic bent, a central thread being Cornett’s claim that spiritual conflict is typical in narcissistic clients who, due to childhood relationships with primary care givers, struggle with the need to find perfection in religion. His approach is to help clients to come to terms with a God who is also imperfect and sometimes disappointing.
Cornett also discusses other theoretical approaches such as the Interpersonal approach, Person Centred, the Existential school and Self psychology, arguing that the emphasis placed on subjectivity by these schools is crucial in the therapeutic approach to clients’ spirituality. Cornett argues for relational qualities such as empathy, non-judgmental curiosity and client freedom and is generally negative towards faith-based counsellors who, he believes, have underlying agendas.
Cornett, whilst appreciating the efforts of Jung and the post Jungians on their insistence ‘that spirituality – the soul – cannot be removed from the psychotherapy office’ also argues that ‘where the Jungian tradition has not fulfilled its potential has been in the subtle deemphasis of the individual in pursuit of collective or archetypal answers’ (1998: 13).
He argues that a significant reason why most psychotherapists resist spiritual issues in the therapy room is because it requires a loss of control, a loss of knowing, believing that, whilst it is important for therapists to have a meaningful sense of their own spirituality, they should also be willing to surrender to mystery.
As I suggested at the start, there are very few studies within the overall literature which have embraced ideas from Analytical psychology. Some examples are as follows.
Lapworth and Sills (2010) propose a model of integration which incorporates the idea of ‘soul work’ (see Hillman, 1979 and Moore, 1992), as well as the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious and archetypes. Clarkson’s study entitled The Therapeutic Relationship (2003) is a relational model which, she claims, is open to integration across most therapeutic schools. This study is a commendable effort to bring together a considerable number of diverse theoretical approaches into a unified model which incorporates several Jungian concepts such as the personal and collective unconscious, archetypes and individuation.
From the Person Centred school, Brian Thorne (2010), a lifelong reader of Jung, suggests that ideas from Analytical Psychology can encourage practitioners to break from the historically secular approach of most therapeutic models, including his own Person Centred approach. Thorne is part of a minority within the Person Centred approach who champion the existence of implicit religious dimensions within Person Centred counselling (see Thorne: 1991, 2000, 2012). He argues, for example, that ‘there is no incompatibility between the message of the Christian mystics and the concepts of the actualising tendency and the internal locus of evaluation’ (2000: 60). Even for those Person Centred therapists whose orientation is already religious or spiritual, this paper proposes that ideas from Analytical Psychology can facilitate further exploration and understanding.
Clark’s book, Understanding religion and spirituality in clinical practice (2018), is aimed at trainees on psychotherapy courses, of any theoretical persuasion, encouraging them to think through the implications of understanding religion and spirituality for their clinical practice. Clark claims that counsellors and psychotherapists are ill-prepared to work with spiritual issues presented by clients. ‘We devote years in our trainings to understand various manifestations of sexuality, for instance, or our relationship to our mothers … About cultural differences, there might be something. But about spirituality and religion, there is nothing’ (Clark, 2018: 12). However, it is written from a depth psychological perspective and does not attempt to explore differences in theoretical assumptions or how the Jungian approach could be integrated.
In summary, there is a wealth of literature highlighting the need for the inclusion and better treatment of the spiritual concerns of clients in counselling and psychotherapy. However, this has not translated into practice with training courses and practicing therapists remaining biased towards secular approaches.
I will now discuss the potential for the application of certain concepts and approaches from Analytical Psychology to mainstream psychotherapy and counselling. Given the vastness of the Jungian and post Jungian writings on religion, I have restricted my discussion to a few selected areas of possibility. In addition, it is beyond the scope of this short essay to discuss potential applications across all counselling and psychotherapy modalities, so I have chosen to focus my discussion on the Person Centred approach only.
Jung’s psychological approach to religion and spirituality
When defining religion, Jung differentiates ‘religion’ from ‘creed’ saying, ‘A creed gives expression to a definite collective belief, whereas the word religion expresses a subjective relationship to certain metaphysical, extramundane factors’ (CW10: 507). Jung describes creeds as ‘codified and dogmatized forms of original religious experience’ (CW11: 10) and religion as ‘a relationship to the highest and most powerful value, be it positive or negative’ (CW11: 137).
Within the Person Centred world Jung is perceived, often negatively, as having a religious, spiritual, metaphysical, even mystical bent. Throughout his writings on religion, however, Jung is consistent in his claims that the approach he takes is both psychological and empirical. In Psychology and Religion, for example, Jung’s opening declaration is that ‘religion is incontestably one of the earliest and most universal expressions of the human mind’ (CW11: 1) going on to claim that his treatment of religion is purely empirical in which he ignores ‘metaphysical or philosophical considerations’, restricting himself solely to ‘the observation of phenomena’ (CW11: 2).
Jung’s psychological approach to religion distances itself from the externalism and literalism of Christianity and other monotheisms by locating the source of religious experience in the human psyche, specifically within the archetypal realm of the collective unconscious. Jung believed that traditional religion infantalised its followers and that his model of religious interiorisation opened-up the possibility of psychotherapy as a useful resource for those who would prefer to distance themselves from religious institutions and, instead, exercise the freedom to pursue a more personal spiritual path and their own direction of individuation.
Individuation, according to Jung, is the natural, teleological propensity of the Self, along with the Ego, to guide the personality towards wholeness and meaning. This involves the unification of the tension of opposites within the psyche (such as good and evil, human and divine, masculine and feminine) via the transcendent function.
There exist interesting parallels between Jung’s concept of individuation and the central premise of ‘self actualisation’ found in Person Centred theory. Carl Rogers, the founder of Person Centred counselling, said of self-actualisation ‘This is the inherent tendency of the organism to develop all its capacities in ways which serve to maintain or enhance the organism … It involves development toward the differentiation of organs and of functions, expansion in terms of growth, expansion of effectiveness … It is development toward autonomy and away from heteronomy, or control by external forces’ (1959: 196).
Jung too believed that, as individual consciousness develops, ‘the more it will emancipate itself from the collective rules, for the empirical freedom of the will grows in proportion to the extension of consciousness’ (CW8: 344).
I suggest that the Jungian concept of individuation and the Rogerian idea of self-actualisation, both of which involve a natural, teleological process of growth, as well as an emphasis on freedom and personal responsibility, provide common ground upon which Jung’s psychological treatment of religion can be explored by those Person Centred practitioners who are concerned with issues of religion and spirituality and who are also interested in the possibilities of a psychological approach.
Analytical psychology’s double perspective
Whilst Jung’s empirical treatment of religion is criticised, by some, for a tendency to reduce metaphysical themes to psychological concepts, it is also criticised, by others, for its implicit metaphysical leanings (see Palmer, 1997: 166-96).
Just a cursory glance at the language Jung employs, which is frequently a combination of the theological (God, Satan, divinity, soul, spirit, good, evil, sin, redemption, resurrection and so on) with the psychological (the unconscious, archetypes, complexes, the opposites, transcendent function, integration and individuation and so forth), it is easy to see why there are some who claim that the metaphysical dimensions of his psychology are self-evident in his writings. Even Jung himself states whether we say, ‘the unconscious psyche or the “grace of God” – names make no difference’ (CW11: 779).
Roderick Main argues that Jung’s implicit metaphysical approach, along with his empirical treatment of religion, rather than being problematical provides a ‘rich and distinctive double perspective’ (2013: 366). According to Main, the intrinsic doubleness of Analytical Psychology, which is both secular and religious, means that Jung’s ‘psychology can be understood coherently both empirically, without reference to transcendent reality, and metaphysically, with reference to transcendent reality’ (2013: 367).
The ability to manage seemingly paradoxical positions by holding the tension between opposites is a central Jungian concept and, when applied to the dual secular and religious perspective of Analytical Psychology, I argue provides a creative and flexible model within which Person Centred therapists, regardless of belief, can work with the spiritual issues of their clients, however they are presented, by holding the tension of both standpoints.
Emphasis on phenomenology
I will now explore another area of commonality between Analytical Psychology and the Person Centred approach which I suggest may also offer possibilities which is the emphasis that both school’s place on phenomenology.
As already seen, in his definition of religion Jung insists that a person’s relationship with it, rather than being based on belief in religious dogma, ought to be deeply experiential. For Jung, ‘God is an immediate experience of a very primordial nature’ (Letters, Vol. 2: 252-253) and that this must involve direct, transformative experiences of what he called the ‘numinosum’ which he describes as something that, ‘seizes and controls the human subject who is always rather its victim than its creator. The numinosum – whatever its cause may be – is an experience of the subject independent of his will’ (CW11: 6).
The Person Centred approach places phenomenology at the heart of its practice. To be a Person Centred therapist is to be as closely attuned as possible to both our own experiences (thoughts, feelings, emotions, attitudes, urges, sensations and so forth) as well as those of our clients. Richard Worsley argues that the religious or spiritual concerns of clients ‘can be coherently understood by forging its links with the phenomenological perspective’ going on to say that ‘Spirituality is a difficult area for both secular and religious dialogue because it is intensely personal, but is in need of a public language. The language of phenomenology is a possible link-language’ (2002: 135). Link-language, according to Worsley, ‘can be expressed in secular or religious terms. The very great variety of spiritualities would make the number of patterns of linkage equally great’ (2002: 139).
In real-life this means that, whether clients choose to express religious or spiritual experience in terms of deep experiences whilst in nature, for example, or when listening to music, when watching a play at the theatre, when creating art, when with family or friends or, indeed, in those deep, transformational moments which are occasionally experienced during therapy sessions, as well as encounters which take place in more traditional religious contexts, all are equally valid. In this regard, I tentatively suggest that the emphasis on experience in Jung’s approach to religion is entirely compatible with the primacy of phenomenology afforded by the Person Centred approach.
The problem of the unconscious
Probably the most significant barrier to collaboration between Analytical Psychology and Person Centred counselling are the epistemological differences which exist between both schools. The most significant one being that Person Centred theory largely ignores the notion of unconscious processes whereas in Analytical Psychology the assumption that there exists a deep and dynamic, collective as well as personal, unconscious is central to both its theory and its practice.
In essence, Person Centred theory assumes that a human being is a conscious organism and that troubling aspects of experience about which one might not understand (pathology) is viewed as being due to incongruence, or alienation from one’s authentic self, rather than emanating from the unconscious. Under suitable relational conditions (Rogers’ core conditions of congruence, unconditional positive regard and empathy), a person is able to regain a sense of authenticity, becoming a fully functioning, conscious human being.
Whilst this was clearly Rogers’ own view in his earlier work, as well as remaining the predominant theoretical position within contemporary Person Centred counselling, there are indications that Rogers’ thinking had evolved in his later writings. For example, in his seminal text, A Way of Being (1980), referring to the collective as well as the individual, Rogers says ‘our organisms as a whole have a wisdom and purposiveness which goes well beyond our conscious thought’ (Rogers, 1980: 106). Later in the same book, he goes on to talk of an ‘inner space’ where there are ‘exciting new possibilities … scarcely mentioned by hard-headed researchers. It is the area of the intuitive, the psychic, the vast inner space that looms before us … There is a growing body of evidence, which is hard to ignore, that shows capacities and potentials within the psyche that seem almost limitless … It appears that our inner world is continually up to something we know nothing about’ (1980: 312-313).
Referring to this inner world as the unconscious, Campbell Purton claims that to overlook it ‘we are not relating to the whole person’ going on to argue that to be ‘fully person-centered … requires in addition to the core conditions of empathy, acceptance and congruence, an attitude that could be called ‘’openness to the unconscious’’’ (1989: 411). Purton’s proposal is creative, however it may be a stretch too far for certain factions of the Person Centred community to accept such a different epistemological position, in which case I suggest that simply an ‘openness to the unknown or the mysterious’ is sufficient. This is in line with Cornett’s idea, as discussed earlier, of surrendering to the mystery of an inner world of metaphysical phenomena which cannot be viewed solely within a secular framework. Again, I argue that this is an attitudinal quality which is entirely compatible with Person Centred values and another area of commonality with Analytical Psychology.
Theory and techniques are secondary to client authority and the therapeutic relationship
The Person Centred approach is based on the belief that, within the therapeutic relationship, client authority is important, and theory and techniques are secondary. There is a perception amongst many in the Person Centred community, however, that their orientation alone practices in this way and that other, more theoretically imbued, approaches possess a tendency to impose conceptual models in ways that are reductive and pathologising as discussed previously. This perception may not be entirely unfounded. Papadopouls (1997), for example, argues that two contrasting epistemologies exist within Analytical Psychology, one which is more open (a type of ‘Socratic ignorance’) and another, which is more closed (a type of ‘gnostic epistemology’). Papadopoulis believes an open epistemology is required for Analytical Psychology to be accepted outside of traditional Jungian circles.
Jung himself articulates such an approach in The Practice of Psychotherapy, where he says, ‘If I wish to treat another individual psychologically at all, I must for better or worse give up all pretensions to superior knowledge, all authority and desire to influence’ (CW16: 2). Elsewhere he says of the therapist’s approach ‘It is in fact largely immaterial what sort of technique he uses, for the point is not the technique but the person who uses the technique’ going on to affirm the primacy of the client by saying, ‘The object of therapy is not the neurosis but the man who has the neurosis’ (CW10: 337).
I argue, therefore, that a relational attitude, which prioritises client experience above theory and techniques, exists within both schools and that this is necessary in order that a therapeutic space can be created within which Analytical Psychology’s approach to spirituality and religion, like any other, can be held by the Person Centred therapist without it interfering with the client’s process.
In Person Centred therapy this is referred to as ‘bracketing’. Worsley, in his book Process Work in Person Centred Therapy, tells the therapist that this is the ability to ‘Bracket off your preconceptions and prejudices by first becoming as fully aware of them as you can, and then set them aside. Know that you will not succeed fully’ (2002: 60). In the same vein, Michael Fordham in his paper On Not Knowing Beforehand, uses the metaphor of a filing cabinet in which Jungian analysts are encouraged to ‘empty one’s mind and, so to speak, lock up one’s knowledge, memory, and desires in that filing cabinet’ in a way that that ‘gives space for the patient’ (1993: 136).
Openness to collaboration
Finally, I argue that, within both schools, there exists an overall open and collaborative attitude, which is necessary for the type of inter-disciplinary cooperation discussed in this essay.
Cooper (2011) argues that the Person Centred approach, with its emphasis on relationality rather than theory, lends itself well to integration with other schools and, since Rogers’ death in 1987, it has evolved into a diverse range of orientations (Sanders, 2012) in which therapists happily work, from integrative, eclectic or pluralistic standpoints, with other modalities. Whilst, in comparison, Analytical Psychology has not ventured too far from the realms of analytical practice, Samuels (2017) believes that a strength of its approach is its ability to synthesise with other clinical schools, particularly humanistic and relational, and that there is still much potential in comparative studies.
In 2014, Samuels and Thorne, important figures from both schools, collaborated for a conference entitled ‘Jungian Analysis and Humanistic Psychotherapy: Critical connections – past, present and future’ (see Samuels, 2014), evidence at the highest level that there exists a willingness and openness for cooperation.
Conclusion
In this paper, I argue that there are areas of weakness within contemporary counselling and psychotherapy approaches to religion and spirituality and that there are certain concepts and approaches, distinctive to Analytical Psychology, which could be usefully applied.
Following a review of the literature, I narrow my focus to Person Centred counselling, and discuss areas of commonality as well as difference. I select a small number of concepts for discussion, namely Jung’s psychological approach to religion and the dual secular and religious perspective found in Analytical Psychology, arguing that both can be used to inform the Person Centred counsellor’s approach to working with a client’s spiritual and religious issues.
Throughout, I argue that an open approach is necessary from both schools and, based upon this, that concepts and approaches from Analytical Psychology, alongside approaches to religion and spirituality from other schools, can be usefully applied to Person Centred counselling.
My hope is that this short paper contributes something to the spirit of inter-disciplinary openness, collaboration and dialogue between Analytical Psychology and the Person Centred approach.
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