How does the spirit come into clinical work? Through the analyst? In the analysand’s work in the analysis? What happens to human destructiveness if we embrace a vision of non-violence? Do dreams open us to spiritual life? What is the difference between repetition compulsion and ritual? How does religion feed terrorism? What happens if analysts must wrestle with hate in themselves? Do psychotherapy and spirituality compete, or contradict, or converse with each other? What does religion uniquely offer, beyond what psychoanalysis can do, to our surviving and thriving? This book abounds with such important questions and discussions of their answers.
Ann Belford Ulanov, M.Div., Ph.D., L.H.D., is the Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychiatry and Religion, Emerita, at Union Theological Seminary, a psychoanalyst in private practice, and a member of the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association, New York City, and the International Association for Analytical Psychology. She is the author of many books, her most recent including: Madness and Creativity (Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology, 2013); The Unshuttered Heart: Opening to Aliveness and Deadness in the Self (2007); Spirit in Jung (2005); Spiritual Aspects of Clinical Work (2004); and Attacked by Poison Ivy, A Psychological Study (2002). She is the co-author, with her late husband Barry Ulanov, of Religion and the Unconscious; Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer; Cinderella and Her Sisters: The Envied and the Envying; The Witch and The Clown: Two Archetypes of Human Sexuality; The Healing Imagination; and Transforming Sexuality: The Archetypal World of Anima and Animus.