The Sacred Cauldron: Psychotherapy as a Spiritual Practice

by Lionel Corbett

At a time when psychotherapy seems to be a purely secular pursuit with no connection to the sacred, The Sacred Cauldron makes the startling claim that, for both participants, psychotherapeutic work is actually a spiritual discipline in its own right. The psyche manifests the sacred and provides the transpersonal field within which the work of therapy is carried out. This book demonstrates some of the ways in which a spiritual sensibility can inform the technical aspects of psychotherapy.

“The Sacred Cauldron is truly a book to be read by both therapists and non-therapists, for it offers a thoughtful, intelligent, sensitive passage through the spiritual quarrels and complexities of our time and addresses our common summons, which is to treat the life of the spirit with the respect, the gravity, and the centrality it deserves. This book is instructive to all, for Corbett not only marshals a wealth of scholarship and clinical experience, but also expresses challenging insights through a calm, reasonable, and commonsense appeal. After this book, the reader will be more thoughtful, more considered, more sophisticated, more appreciative of the importance of therapy as a vehicle for healing and for engaging the numinous.”
—James Hollis, Ph.D., Jungian analyst and author of What Matters Living a More Considered Life

Dr. Lionel Corbett trained in medicine and psychiatry in England and as a Jungian analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago. He is currently on the core faculty of Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California, and the author of The Religious Function of the Psyche and Psyche and the Sacred, as well as various professional articles. His main interest is in the religious function of the psyche and the ways in which this function expresses itself through the structures of personality.

Genres: Psychology

337 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 28, 2011

Reviews

[Lex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still working on this book as I do many. It changes things for me every time I turn to it.

[Qasim Zafar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started reading The Religious Function of the Psyche by Lionel Corbett, and felt that I needed supplementary material to not only understand what he was saying but also the perspective he was coming from, in depth. It was during the search for that supplementary material that I quickly came across this book.

The greatest feature about this book is that it does not talk negatively about religion as such, but works from the acknowledgement that many traditional ways of believing have lost their meaning for people today and have become little more than impositions which enforce conformity for the sake of belonging. In this book Corbett is of the opinion that the human psyche is built to have numinous experiences (which he believes are religious in nature) and learning how to properly interpret them leads to a deeply personal spirituality. In this quest one very well may end up choosing an already established religion, but one's approach will be deeply personal and likely apart from the maddening crowd.

I really could not put this book down once I picked it up.

[Gemma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moving, deeply felt, wise, humane. The longer I am in practice as a psychotherapist, the more I find in this beautiful book. I only wish I had memorized it a dozen years ago.