Category: Jungian

Navigating the Landscape of Spiritual Experience in Therapy

Posted on by Psychotherapy.net Team

A Discipline Founded in Spirituality

One of my favorite literary quotes is from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” It implies that there are mysteries and experiences beyond our understanding of the world. Hamlet says this after encountering his father’s ghost, which is considered a strange and supernatural event.

The Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung had many paranormal experiences including near-death ones and a series of visions. He wrote and painted extensively about these experiences. Though committed to practicing practical psychology, he pioneered a way of incorporating mysticism, like astrology and divination, in psychological work.

The American philosopher and psychologist, William James was one of the founders of psychology as a discipline. He identified four characteristics of mystical experience: ineffable, noetic, transient and passive.

All this to say that spiritual encounters are foundational human experiences.

The ACA’s Code of Ethics emphasizes a client-centered approach, meaning whether or not to discuss spirituality is ultimately decided by the client. The counselor should only explore this topic if it is relevant to the client’s concerns and with their consent, and counselors must acknowledge and respect the diverse spiritual beliefs of their clients, including those who may not identify with any particular religion.

I come from a culture with spiritual traditions ranging from Jewish to Pagan to Christian, often blending them. My family’s stories include tales of mysterious visitations (when her beloved grandfather died, my mother said he came to her in the middle the of the night) as well as rituals like baptisms, seances, lighting candles, and making offerings to saints. We also have a Freemason or two among my ancestors. I have engaged in a lifelong exploration of spiritual practices and traditions including Catholicism, Reformed Judaism, Taoism, Tantra Shaivism, and Dzogchen Buddhism so when it comes to spirituality, I’m open to whatever shows up.

Valuing the Client’s Spirituality

A non-binary client in their late thirties was facing a 4-year battle with malignant terminal cancer. They shared that their experience using psychedelics felt initially terrible and filled with suffering, but that when they were able to surrender, they experienced a sense of wholeness and bliss. I suggested we could use this psychedelic vision as a map for their journey going forward with illness and death, something they had not considered nor shared with their previous counselor.

Another client shared that traveling abroad enabled her to soften the edges of her identity and boundaries, allowing her to experience the world and other people with a sense of greater connection and ease. She strongly felt that travel was a spiritual experience for her that aligned with her Jewish roots.

A client who had struggled with intergenerational trauma and loss, practiced self-administering psilocybin alone and shared with me her insights. She described a mixture of experiences, from the more mundane to a profound connection through a vision of an ancestor whom she felt she actually embodied during a mushroom journey. This enabled her to connect with feelings of forgiveness for the suffering she endured.

Perhaps one of my most challenged clients identifies as a Christian. He struggles with an understandable dilemma: if God is good, why does evil exist? And why does God allow women he falls in love with to stay in abusive situations? Though I do not subscribe to his beliefs, I feel strongly that his questions are profound and worth exploring. It is, at times, difficult for me to refrain from remedying his dilemma through my more Eastern spiritual beliefs. Instead, I shared Anthony de Mello’s little gem of a book entitled The Way to Love. de Mello was a Jesuit who lived in India most of his life and wrote bracingly about God, Reality, and Love.

Clients who identify as Pagan or Wiccan, will often discuss their Tarot readings with me. I feel thankful for my familiarity with this tradition and genre of symbology that allows me to explore their concerns using a rich metaphorical language.

These are some of the questions I use when approaching clients’ spiritual experiences:

  • What do you feel or think this dream/vision is telling you?
  • Is there a message here that feels relevant to your life?
  • What troubles or reassures you about this experience?
  • If this experience was “your marching orders” as it were, what would those be?

When clients talk about noetic experiences, I listen closely for clues to discover and incorporate meaning in their experiences. The terrain of spiritual experience is as complex and multifaceted as human consciousness itself. Our therapeutic approach must honor this complexity—recognizing that spiritual encounters are deeply personal, often ineffable, and profoundly transformative. Just as Carl Jung and William James understood, these experiences transcend simple categorization, challenging our conventional understanding of reality and self.

My key therapeutic considerations include:

  • Embracing radical openness to clients’ spiritual narratives
  • Maintaining ethical boundaries while creating space for profound exploration
  • Recognizing spirituality as a potential source of meaning, resilience, and healing
  • Understanding that spiritual experiences are as unique as the individuals who encounter them

As counselor, my role is not to validate or invalidate spiritual experiences, but to provide a compassionate, non-judgmental container for understanding. Whether these experiences emerge through dreams, meditation, near-death encounters, or altered states of consciousness, they represent critical moments of potential insight and personal growth.

Critically, my approach must be rooted in the ACA’s ethical framework: client-centered, consensual, and fundamentally respectful of individual spiritual diversity. I listen not to interpret, but to understand—creating a therapeutic relationship where clients feel safe exploring the most intimate dimensions of their inner landscape.

Just as my own journey has woven through diverse spiritual traditions—from Judaism to Buddhism, from mystical practices to academic inquiry—so too must my therapeutic practice remain flexible, curious, and deeply attuned to the nuanced ways humans make meaning of their existential experiences.

Our relationship(s) with the invisible and numinous (meaning, suggesting the presence of divinity, or just Presence) is as individual and unique as fingerprints, yet has common features. These experiences may elicit awe, offer reassurance, incite action, and clarify issues. I have found the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ) to be very useful in this regard. It was developed in the 1960’s to assess mystical experiences caused by hallucinogens. It covers dimensions such as unity, sacredness, and ineffability. The Revised Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ-30) is a 30-item version of the MEQ that is used in clinical research & measures four dimensions of spirituality: belief in God, mindfulness, search for meaning, and feeling of security. It can be downloaded here: https://psychology-tools.com/test/meq-30.

***

Ultimately, spirituality in counseling is about creating a sacred space of genuine human connection—where the mysterious, the ineffable, and the profoundly personal can be witnessed with compassion, wisdom, and profound respect.

Questions for Thought and Discussion

Which of the cases the author discussed resonated with you the most? In what ways?

How do you incorporate spirituality into your own clinical practice?

How do you integrate your own spirituality into your clinical work?

When Your Client Dreams about You

Posted on by Psychotherapy.net Team

Things were not all good between my client and me, but I had no idea. She showed up promptly and consistently, seemed to like me, at times even told me how much the therapy was helping her. Yet she often seemed uncomfortable, preferring to fill the session with detailed accounts of her life rather than engage in the directly experiential way I like to invite. My role became that of a witness, a compassionate listener for sure, but rather a passive one. I thought, okay, this is our dance-step.

Then she brought the following dream: I was cleaning her house and had done rather a cursory job of it. The house was still so incredibly unkempt she had rolled up her sleeves and was tackling the lion’s share of the job herself. Later I show up with a flashlight and am opening up rooms she never visits, illuminating darkened corners.

The metaphors here are pretty darn obvious, so I won’t belabor them. If we read the dream as a commentary on the therapeutic relationship, I am clearly getting a mixed review – leaving her to clean up her own house because I’ve done such a bad job of it, but also encouraging her to look into areas (inside herself or in her life) that she would otherwise not visit.

What I love about this example is that the dream becomes the vehicle for the client to comment on the therapy process in a way that she would never have done otherwise. I try hard to level the playing field, be open and immediate with my clients, invitational, friendly, casual – in all ways endeavor to make the therapy relationship feel safe enough for clients to say anything. But often it’s only through dreams that I hear truly honest commentary on the things that don’t sit right with them about my job as their therapist.

This argument for listening to dreams extends further. In my personal experience as a client, I have found dreams open up avenues I would otherwise not walk down. The unflinching honesty of dreams at times makes me cringe – they are like that good friend who will tell you when you have spinach in your teeth or have behaved badly.

The most profound therapy session of my life was precipitated by a dream. I was born very premature and in the germ-phobic mid-60s, so I was kept sealed off in an incubator, touched only as needed for the first six weeks of my life. I had another near-death experience as an adolescent, when, convinced I was invincible, dove under a waterfall and then got carried deep underwater by the powerful current, nearly drowning before I resurfaced.

I had a powerfully scary dream that wove these two events together, and because I was seeing a Jungian analyst at the time, naturally I brought the dream to our session. We revisited the dream material, re-entered the dream, sketched it… but all this did was underscore the profound sense of aloneness contained in the dream. Then my therapist asked me to re-enact a part of the dream where I reach out and no one is there. In that moment, he grabbed my outstretched hand firmly and looked me right in the eye, reaching back across the years to provide a firm supportive presence to that lonely baby and that teenager. It was so unexpected it sent a kind of shock wave through my body.

This profound moment had ripple effects that ultimately shifted my sense of self and relationship. Yet I would not have brought the topic up had I not had that dream. I have now been working with dreams, my own and those of others, for more than 20 years. Sadly in that time, I have seen dreamwork fall out of fashion. I am hoping the examples offered here show that dreamwork is not just some quaint antiquated practice but one that has current relevance: we all dream about things that are deeply authentic and that are too often left out of the therapeutic conversation.

Psychotherapy and the Care of Souls

Posted on by Psychotherapy.net Team

To Serve the Soul

In Greek mythology, the wise healer and teacher Cheiron is part horse and part human, a centaur of sorts, but quite different from his wild and hardly civilized half-horse/half-human brothers. He did his work of healing and teaching in a cave. As a therapist, I sometimes think of myself as part animal, sitting in my cave, dealing with primal aspects of human existence, barely able to distinguish healing from teaching.

The modern therapist seems to think of the problems that come to him or her as deviations from the standard of normalcy and health. The point is to restore a person to a point where the presenting symptoms have been removed, as if by psychological surgery. I don’t see it that way. People come to me because deep down they can’t experience the joy of being who they are. They don’t feel in the positive flow of life. They may feel stuck in some repeating pattern that seems to go back far into their history. They may be focused on, or better, mesmerized by some symptom like an obsession or paranoia or anxiety. Generally, it’s the nature of life to flow, like a river, and not to be stuck or stopped.

Whenever I want to get on track with my work as a psychotherapist, I think back on the word. It is made of up two key Greek terms: psyche (soul) and therapeia (serve). “Psycho-therapy” means “to serve the soul.” Psyche is not mind or behavior, and therapeia does not mean healing or making better. I always keep in mind that my job is to serve the soul, or care for it. When I used an ancient phrase, common in Platonic literature, as the title of my most popular book, Care of the Soul, I was simply putting the word “psychotherapy” into English.

I think of the soul as the life in us that is immeasurably deep. Sometimes it feels like a spring or font of existence, making us feel alive and giving us something of a direction and identity. To a large extent it is autonomous, having its own purposes, desires and intentions. When you delve deep into it, you encounter basic human themes and patterns, what Plato and Jung and others call “archetypes.” The need for love, the desire to create, the comfort of home, the excitement of travel—these aren’t the characteristics of any particular person. They are, at least potentially, ways in which all people may experience life.

When these archetypal patterns come to life in a person, they usually have a strong force and allure. You are happy to be in love and can think of nothing else. You fear illness and death, and that emotion, with its clinging thoughts, gets hold of you. You glimpse a certain career, and you go after it with a passion.

Soul is intimate, embedded in life, vital and energetic. It seems to constantly want more life and vitality and therefore can be a threat to the status quo. “As you tend your soul, you may try to sense what it needs and wants, and you may discover that its needs may not dovetail with your own wishes.” In that spirit, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats said that his poetry came out of a tension between his own ideas and those of an antithetical self he felt inside him.

As I see it, this other being in us, the soul, is vaster than our small minds can contain. It’s strong and mysterious, and at times a true adversary. Our job is to get to know the soul and cooperate with it, understanding that our happiness and peace on earth depends on a positive and creative response to it. Psychotherapy may entail simply living in a way cognizant of the soul and its purposes.

Soul offers a deep and powerful sense of identity that counters any tendency to be caught in the limited understandings and values of the family or the culture. It asks that we each become individuals, not so identified with the structures around us. This need is so strong that I imagine it in the familiar imagery of rebirth: we are born into biological life and culture, and then we have to be born again into our own individuality and uniqueness. Along with Socrates, I would describe psychotherapy as a kind of maieutics, or midwifery. We have to assist at the birth of the soul into life, which implies the arrival of a unique person. Socrates said: “My concern is not with the body but with the soul that is in the travail of birth” (Theatetus, 150 b).

The Travail of Birth

The travail of birth is exactly what happens in therapy, to one degree or another. Travail means labor, but I see it more as a process. In formal therapy you reflect openly and seriously on the past, on dreams, on emotional difficulties, on relationships and a number of other issues, the material of a life, and process them. As you look more deeply and imaginatively at them, you see better what wants to be born and what hinders the birth. For many people, early traumas and bad parenting and unfortunate adult influences and threatening injunctions keep their longstanding hold and stand in the way of the soul’s movement into life.

Years ago I read the religion scholar Mircea Eliade’s unsettling description of a primitive rite of passage, and it has stayed with me. Young people would be placed in the earth, naked, perhaps under a pile of leaves, overnight or for several days, within a ritual context of masks, drums, body paint and dance. Then they’d be taken out and washed and clothed, adults now and fully part of the community.

I see therapy along these lines. “To be born into your individuality is no light matter. You need an impressive experience of death and rebirth.” Most of the time a real and transformative round of therapy is a step-by-step process of being reborn. The therapist is the elder in charge of the rite, but he or she is only the guide, not the healer. The point is to arrange an effective rebirth, letting the person then go on to discover his life. The therapist does not decide what life is best for the person, whether to be more dependent or independent, emotionally contained or effusive, whether to be married to a different person or to live somewhere else. The therapist doesn’t know what is best for the person, he or she can only assist at the birth of the soul.

Above all, a therapist needs purity of intention, the capacity to hear stories of suffering without responding unconsciously out of his own prejudices. A therapist has to know himself so well that he will pass on any temptation to engage in his own typical reactions. He will not take credit for any progress, and in fact will not think in terms of progress, but only care. Care is not heroic, it isn’t getting anywhere and it has no need to solve problems. A good therapist doesn’t see life as a problem to solve but as a gift to be observed closely and supported.

A therapist will not be deluded by the delusions of his patient. He will not be taken in by any loose complexes in his patient that try to trip up the therapist. If a patient says, “You haven’t given me your full attention today,” a good therapist won’t defend or explain himself. He might simply say, “You’re right. I’m preoccupied with my own situation today. Let’s start again.” He will not feel the guilt the patient wants him to feel and will not accept any adulation the patient tosses his way. Both are traps. He is neutral, not willing to get pulled away from his center by a patient’s neurotic need. In the face of sober and heavy influence, he may find neutrality in lightness of spirit and good humor. He may laugh easily but never sardonically.

Overcoming Our Complexes

A good therapist has moved past his need to help. While it’s true that doing therapy is being in therapy—the therapist may work through some of his own issues while being with another—the therapist is also neutral about his life work. He is not thrown when a patient doesn’t respond well to the therapist’s ideas and efforts. He doesn’t himself need a patient to get better or to go through the therapeutic process the way the therapist thinks is best. The therapist surrenders any pet enthusiasms, such as hoping that his patient will become more independent, artistic, self-aware, or emotionally expressive.

This neutrality is not indifference but an achievement in the therapist’s own opus, the work of his soul. He is not led on by his complexes in relation to his patients, the deeper meaning of the interesting classical notion of counter-transference. He is not at all perfect, but he is not acting out with his patients. He has an unusual degree of self-possession. He can reflect effectively on his own allegiances, philosophies, theories, techniques and ideals. He has developed his own approach and is not completely identified with a given figure in psychology or with a special theory.

A therapist also has to know how to deal with complexes of the people he assists. Jung described a complex as a sub-personality. I would put it differently: a complex has a face. Acting out a complex is like putting on a costume, though you don’t know that you’ve put it on. These figures of the deep psyche that take over a person, like Dr. Jekyll swamping Mr. Hyde, are unusually intelligent, convincing and full of shadow.

A person with a mother complex may strike you at first as being caring, thoughtful and capable of deep emotion. Only later do you see that this figure, this daemonic possession, dominates the person and may suffocate and overpower others who come into its domain. A mother who is atrociously critical of her daughter may believe that she is only doing what is best. Others may tell the daughter how lucky she is to have such a wonderful mother, and the daughter is thrown into painful confusion. Should she be grateful, or should she run away?

The therapist has to deal cautiously with the complex that enters his consulting room. He must not get caught, but that kind of neutrality is not easily achieved. He may be especially susceptible to certain complexes and not see them for what they are.

Complex is not the best word, perhaps, but it is traditional and important. A complex is more like a powerful presence that can assume the cohesion of a personality, although sometimes it is only an urge or an impulse. It can completely overwhelm a person or it can be merely an influence. In any case, a therapist needs courage and circumspection to deal with one, whether in his patient or in himself.

Religious traditions teach as much about these presences as psychology does, and it might help a therapist to do some study in religions and even see his role as being both psychological and spiritual. Religion specializes in rituals that help us meet the complexes in highly symbolic ways. In traditional Catholic confession, for example, you acknowledge dark spirits that invade your life, and the confession of these presences goes a long way toward dealing with them.

Personally, I have cultivated powers of intuition, skill at working with images, and knowledge about traditional spiritual rites and images so I can be prepared for images people use in telling their life stories and reporting their night dreams. I have drawn on the model of C. G. Jung, who was concerned both to be an intelligent, rational thinker and researcher and at the same time to go to great effort to employ the non-rational methods of the spiritual traditions. He was a stone-cutter, calligrapher, painter, and architect in his own way, making his personal environment link closely with his inner life.

Guide of Souls, Leader of Rituals

My mentors—Jung, James Hillman, and Rafael Lopez-Pedraza—have emphasized the role of the mythic Hermes in the work of therapy. Jung said that the work or opus begins and ends in Mercury (the Roman name for Hermes). This means that in this work you have to be imaginative, clever, quick-witted and skilled with language. You appreciate paradoxes and apparent opposites. You see past and through any material that is presented, and you go beyond the modern notion of the highly educated, trained expert. You need a deep and probing appreciation for the intricacies of the psyche, and your preparation has to be both scholarly and personal.

I have a deep appreciation for the work of therapists and I honor and support any therapists I meet. They have a key role in modern life as they address matters of the soul and spirit. In some ways they are the modern priest, priestess, guide of souls and leader of ritual. Their work is challenging for all its depth and mysteriousness, but it is equally rewarding precisely because it goes so deep.

But some therapists make a mistake in thinking of their position as one of a trained advice-giver or aid to adjustment and smooth living. Their job, rather, is to be courageous enough to face the demons with their patients and get tangled in the complicated mysteries of a human life. To do their job effectively, they need to know depth psychology, philosophy, solid religious thought and art. They should be at home with dreams and extraordinary fantasies. They should be able to see through aggression and masochism to glimpse the positive mysteries trying to be expressed and lived.

This kind of therapist has thought deeply about the mysteries of human personality and doesn’t reduce them to simple patterns. Throughout his life and career this therapist continues to explore complex matters, prizing any resources that help, and faces his own complexes. He is always on the border, Hermes-like, between the inner and the outer, the personal and the universal, ordinary life and the sacred, and the surfaces and the depths. He is shaman-like, able to traverse levels of reality and experience. He has adapted to the mysterious nature of his work by being himself a mysterious person, not too easy to read and comfortable being neutral in the face of another’s passion.

The Cheiron therapist works in a cave, a place set apart from the normal way of seeing things. He needs a lot of animal in him to sense the many messages from his patient and from within himself. He has to take on the mythic dimensions of a centaur because work with the soul is too much for the human mind. “The therapist is willing to be bigger than life and almost other than human, a person of huge imagination, able to hold almost any manifestation of human struggle.” He has to be naturally religious, in the sense of honoring the natural life flowing through himself and his clients and responding effectively to the great mysteries that only the best art and religious forms have been able to grasp. He is a person able to contain the immense joys and sorrows that visit every human life. And all of this in an ordinary person, humble in the best sense, in love with life and able to love those in distress. It’s a wonderful calling and a grace to those who accept it.

Thomas Moore on the Soul of Psychotherapy

Posted on by rezendevknowfully.com

Therapy Isn't Healing

Deb Kory: Thomas Moore, you are a writer, a theologian, a psychotherapist, a musician, a former monk, and a professor. You lecture widely on incorporating aspects of the soul into daily life, and have written many books on the subject, including the bestseller, Care of the Soul. You've just released a book called A Religion of One’s Own, which seems in part intended to bring meaning back to the word and to argue against the secularization of modern life. Since our audience is primarily psychotherapists, I'd like to first ask you about psychotherapy: How you define it and what role do you see it playing in bringing soul back into the world, and into your clients?
Thomas Moore: I go back, as I always do in my books, to etymologies. I like to think about how people first thought about the use of the word since the very beginning. The word therapy has been around for a couple of thousand years at least, and originally among the Greeks it meant to care for or attend to. I like that meaning of the word. It never meant to heal or to fix or anything like that. In fact, there's a passage in Plato where a student asked Socrates what he means by therapy, and Socrates says, "It's like someone who takes care of horses. They give them water and food and take them for some exercise and clean their stalls. That kind of thing is therapy."

So it's an interesting definition of the word. Then if you put psyche with it—psyche is the word for soul—you get psychotherapy, to care for the soul, to attend to the soul. That's how I see therapy.
I'm not interested in helping a person get along in life, and I'm not interested in helping them improve or get better as a person. That's more of an ego kind of project. I'm interested in the soul, which is deeper.
I'm not interested in helping a person get along in life, and I'm not interested in helping them improve or get better as a person. That's more of an ego kind of project. I'm interested in the soul, which is deeper.

When someone comes to me for therapy, I'm always listening at a very deep level, because I want to know what their soul is hungry for. I listen to their stories and look for where they are getting in the way of their soul’s unfolding. What is trying to emerge? Where are they headed in spite of themselves?
DK: So you are against the whole idea of therapists being healers?
TM: Yes, pretty much.
DK: Can you say more about that? Is it because it’s too omnipotent a role?
TM: Yes. I think the idea of care is different from helping or healing. Healing sounds like you're really going to once and for all fix this person and resolve their problems or get rid of their pain. Sometimes, in fact most of the time, what I feel I have to do is be with the person in their suffering or their pain, and in the moment I may hope that we get to the point where they don't suffer anymore, but I don't think I can get there by being the hero and thinking that I can get rid of their pain. I can't. But together what we can do is see what's going on and, as they get to be closer to their deeper life, their attitude in life shifts and they usually make different life decisions. Those things tend to resolve the pain and the suffering.
DK: So you don’t necessarily feel responsible for what happens in therapy?
TM: I don't feel responsible, no.
I'm rather shocked when I hear from some of my clients that they've been in therapy with people who tell them what they should be doing. I can't imagine it because I don't know—who am I?
It’s tempting at times to tell people what I think they should do, but I don't think that's my place. I'm rather shocked when I hear from some of my clients that they've been in therapy with people who tell them what they should be doing. I can't imagine it because I don't know—who am I? I don't have any special insight or any kind of revelation about people's lives. So what I do is I go with them and I try to get a glimpse of who they are and what's wanting to emerge.
DK: That’s in striking opposition to all of the manualized and “evidence-based” psychotherapy that’s currently in vogue.
TM: I'm not interested in any of that.
DK: You're kind of outside of that system altogether.
TM: Totally on the outside of that system.
DK: It sounds like part of what you've been trying to do throughout the course of your career is to critique that system, because it's in every profession in one way or another. Perhaps that’s what you mean by secularization?
TM: Yes, it is.
DK: It’s almost as if science, itself, has become a religion.
TM: I think when you secularize, the ego comes to the foreground, in the sense of, “I know what's going on. I need to be in control.” My approach has been more what I would consider a religious approach, in the deepest sense—not as part of any particular religion, but rather appreciating and acknowledging that there are things going on that I don't understand and can't control, but I can help with by being an attentive listener. I respect what's happening in a person, and I try not to listen to it with the thought that I know what's best or I know what's healthy. I never use words like that—“healthy” or “correct” or “right.” I watch my language carefully and try to let the soul of a person be revealed. When they see who they are at that soul level, they can make better decisions for themselves.

A lot of people have not had much education in psychology, and they don't really understand too much what's going on with their emotional life or their relationships. So we have to go deep into it where they can see what's happening, and then make their own decisions.

“Who Wants to Adapt to a World That is Crazy?”

DK: You also said that you're not interested in helping people get by in the world. Is part of that because the world is kind of nuts?
TM: That's certainly a part of it. Who wants to adapt to a world that is crazy? I've been saying ever since I first wrote Care of the Soul that if you do care for your soul you're going to be quite eccentric because, for one thing, that's where your individuality is.
If you do care for your soul you're going to be quite eccentric because, for one thing, that's where your individuality is.
The more you get in touch with your own soul, the more individual you become. Jung called this work individuation, and I think that makes sense because you become more of an individual from being in tune with who you are.

Another piece of this modern approach that I don't agree with is this idea of having some kind of standard for normalcy. We have these standards that are expressed in these lists of disorders, the DSM-5, but behind all of that is the assumption that there is such a thing as being normal and well-adjusted. I would probably have a very different type of DSM myself because I'm not interested in adjustment and being normal so much as really being in touch with that deep place. People may not fit in very well when they do that. They may be odd, and their friends may wonder what's going on with them.
DK: Do you see yourself as radical?
TM: No, not at all. But I was in Berkeley a couple of months ago, and I was at what was considered, I guess, a radical radio station, and I was just talking about things that, to me, seem quite ordinary. Afterwards the two people interviewing me said that I fit into their program quite well because it was also radical. But I don’t see myself as radical; I’m quite traditional.
DK: Am I right that you didn't get any kind of traditional psychological training? You didn't go through a psychotherapy school, right?
TM: Well, my training was actually in Rogerian therapy. I did a lot of counseling work when I was doing my PhD in religion. I did my religious studies work at Syracuse University, which is a very broad program. I studied world religions in one phase of it and depth psychology in another phase and the arts, especially literature, in the third part. These three parts came together to be the focus of my study of religion. When I was doing that, it occurred to me—I don't know why—that the only way I could really learn psychology would be to also train as a therapist. So I did.

A lot of my work was in counseling psychology, which was mainly based on Carl Rogers' approach. I did a lot of coursework and supervised practice, practicums, and led groups. Usually you can get a license if you have a PhD in religion or if you have some background in religion plus some psychological training, and I had both, so I put those together and got my counselor’s license.
DK: Did you decide at a certain point to leave the constraints of being licensed or are you still licensed?
TM: No, I just moved to another state, and the state I moved to requires the kind of therapy that I just don't understand or really want to do. So I no longer do therapy as such as a licensed therapist. I counsel people on this work of the soul based on my books, and I tell people that I'm not a therapist in the sense that people do it today and that I can't do that kind of therapy anymore. I mean, I probably would do it if the system were set up in a way that I could fit in, but I can't, so I don't. In fact, it’s just not what I do at all.
DK: What is it about the system that you can't abide?
TM: Well, a number of things. I'm not interested in quantified studies at all. That's never been a part of my life. I'm trained in the classics. I know Greek mythology very well. I know history and the history of philosophy and theology and medicine.
I’ve never become a Jungian analyst because I feel it’s too narrow for me. I don't want to have to fit in with the language and ideas of Jungianism.
That gives you a great deal to work with. Anyone who knows Jungian psychology would know that my background in religion and mythology are perfect for a Jungian analyst. I've studied Jung for years. In fact, a week ago I was in Canada speaking to a Jung society, and I'm going in a couple of days to a Jung society in the Southern United States. I speak to Jung groups frequently because I do know Jung well. They're interested in my background in religious studies and the arts and also my work over all these years, all these books about the soul. So that’s an area where I could fit in more easily, but I’ve never become a Jungian analyst because I feel it’s too narrow for me. I don't want to have to fit in with the language and ideas of Jungianism.

A Religion of One's Own

DK: Your most recent book, A Religion of One's Own, is that a play on Virginia Woolf?
TM: Yes, it is.
DK: My sense from reading it and from reading many of your works is that every system of belief or philosophy is too narrow, that you're fundamentally ecumenical. You love to dive deeply into various traditions, but you’re not interested in being a certified member of anything.
TM: I don't think anyone should be confined to one particular system of belief.
If you really want to be someone who is alive in what you're doing and not just following a system, then you want to make it your own in some way.
I wrote A Religion of One's Own to make that clear. It could also be “a psychology of one’s own.” It’s important to honor the traditions and you can study any branch of psychology you want, but I think if you really want to be someone who is alive in what you're doing and not just following a system, then you want to make it your own in some way. I happened to take it pretty far in making it my own.
DK: You're a little eccentric.
TM: Yes. That's exactly it, and that's just the way it is. I'm surprised because I'm not a radical type. I'm kind of an easygoing person. I don't challenge the world too much except in my writing. In my style, I write a lot of things that go against the themes of the times and the spirit of the times, but I don't do it in a style or a manner that is confrontational. I simply present and say, "Well, if you want this, great. If you don't, forget it."
DK: So your style isn't confrontational, but your ideas are or could be perceived as such.
TM: Yes.
DK: I’m imagining with this recent book you’re being critiqued both from the Left and the Right.
TM: Yes.
DK: There’s a fair amount of religiophobia on the Left and there are a lot of therapists, in my experience, who harbor a not-so-subtle contempt for religious people. Or rather, some religions are considered okay: Buddhists are fine, Mormons are not. This really goes unchallenged in therapy culture.
TM: Yes, I agree.
DK: And then on the Right you’re probably just seen as an apostate. Are you getting challenged on that at all on this book tour?
TM: A little bit, but very little actually. People get the idea right away, and they're interested in it. The majority of people who hear this idea say to me, "Well, this is what I've been doing and thinking all along, and it's really helpful for me to have it articulated."
I’ve had feedback from people saying that they don't need religion. The secular world is all they need.
That's the response I get most of the time. Now, maybe there are people out there who are more traditional in their religious practice who just aren't interested and so aren't talking to me. On the other hand, I’ve certainly had feedback from people saying that they don't need religion. The secular world is all they need.
DK: I'm thinking of people like Bill Maher, and a lot of these so-called “new atheists” who think that religion is the root of all evil.
TM: The problem I have with them is that they usually pick a very childlike or fundamentalist type of religion and critique it as if it stands for all religions. Take me on, you know? Years ago, actually, I tried to have a debate with Carl Sagan because he was saying that a lot that goes by the name of religion is superstition. We had set up a debate, but then just at the point when we were making the arrangements he developed cancer, so it never happened.

Critiquing the most simple-minded and fundamentalist forms of religion is easy. I critique them, too, and have a lot of that kind of atheism in me as well. I have no problem with that; but when you look more deeply at the richness and depth of so many traditions, when you get right down to the subtleties, I'd hate to see us turn into a totally secular world.

DK: How do you deal with the reflexive antagonism that people have toward religion? If you were speaking to a group of therapists who were more of the secular type, how would you argue for integrating more of this soul work into therapy?
TM: I have worked with psychiatrists and other kinds of therapists, and a lot of them come to me and they want to open up. They want something more in their practice, but they don't know what that would be. I try to give them background, history, a lot of examples, a lot of material—to let them see the intelligence of the spiritual traditions. I present it to them as someone who really loves these traditions, but I'm not a member. I'm not defending them. I'm not that kind of person.
DK: You're not an “ist” or into “isms.”
TM:
I don’t actually participate in the Catholic Church, but that’s because I think they don't want me. I'm not sure it's because I don't want them.
No. I'm not. I'm not in one of these traditions either. Though I sometimes call myself a Zen Catholic, because in my own life, I was born into Catholicism. It's not something you just set aside intentionally; it's something that's just part of you. I don’t actually participate in the Catholic Church, but that’s because I think they don't want me. I'm not sure it's because I don't want them.
DK: Do you think you'd be excommunicated?
TM: Oh, yeah. There is plenty of grounds for that.

With therapists, though, I try to give them an intelligent approach to how to include spiritual matters in psychotherapy. I try to show them that you can't really separate spirit from soul. I talk about the difference between those things and how you can't separate them.

The Planet Has a Soul

DK: Can you talk about the difference between spirit and soul?
TM: Well, it's dicey in a way. In the traditions that I follow, the spirit takes us away from our bodies and our appetites and our relationships and our everyday lives in order to have a big vision, a cosmology, a cosmic vision to ask questions about how the world came to be or how to live and to meditate and pray. These are all things that take us up and away.
DK: Those are spiritual.
TM: Yes, and these things are good, very valuable and important.
The spirit takes us away from our bodies and our appetites and our relationships and our everyday lives in order to have a big vision, a cosmology, a cosmic vision to ask questions about how the world came to be or how to live and to meditate and pray.
But the soul at its depth has not been developed very much. There are many traditions that deal more with the depth of our everyday life, like the importance of home and the deep fantasies and emotions connected with home. Memories of home and the need to be at home and to feel at home with what we're doing, the importance of family and feeling family even if it's not literal. It might be the family spirit at work or in your town, to be living a sensual life or a sexual life. A lot of spiritual people have trouble with sexuality because it's in another direction. It seems to be a problem. So what I try to do is speak for those things, for the soul. I'm also someone who loves the spiritual as well. I value both of those directions.
DK: So the soul is more grounded. It's more earthbound.
TM: Yeah, definitely grounded.
DK: Is there more of an ethical dimension to it?
TM: Yes, there are ethics, but it's a different kind of ethics because soul ethics are rooted in, let's say, your love of the planet or your love of your place, your home, or your appreciation for the individuality of people because you know people directly. That's a more heart-centered ethics. But there is another important kind of ethics, which is spiritual, which would mean you have a vision about the planet and about history and people and how we need to behave. All of that kind of thing could be very spiritual. So I like to have those two together. You need both motivations for an ethical life.
DK: Given you're deeply rooted in your own ecumenism and ethics, what do you think our role is in trying to make the world a better place? You say we aren’t healers, that we help people only in the sense of getting people connected to their soul’s hunger. What about the world beyond the therapy room? Are we bound by ethics to try to, for example, fight against climate change and all the ways humans are destroying the planet and each other? Or is that separate from our work as therapists?
TM: Let's go back to the definition of therapy: care of the soul. One interesting aspect of soul is that in the traditions about the soul, it's not just humans. The planet itself has a soul. I’ve got some documents here in my study from five or six hundred years ago that say that the planet has a soul and that the things on the planet have a soul. So if psychotherapy is care of the soul, the care of the planet is a kind of psychotherapy. Do you know what I mean? You don't just care for people or individuals.

I do a lot of work with hospitals and have been for a long time. I go into a hospital and I try to talk to the doctors and nurses especially about the importance of family because the illness a person has is a soul illness as well as a body illness, and the family plays a role because that's part of a person's deep life. It's a very important part. So we try to talk to hospitals about the importance of including the family. Not just tolerating them, but really seeing them at the very center of illness, both to heal and even being partly responsible in some ways.

A Psychotherapy of One's Own

DK: I have been licensed for about a year after a very long process, many thousands of hours of unpaid labor and studying and writing a dissertation and post-doc hours and licensing exams, and I feel a little bit like after all that time I'm starting from scratch in a way. There was a lot along the journey that simply wasn't useful and I almost had to fight to keep my soul. There were things that I brought to my clients from the very first day that I value—just a certain way of loving and being with people that I feel is the most fundamental part of the work I do—more than any theories or techniques. Yet hardly anyone ever mentioned the word “love” in all my years of training. I felt like I had to fight to retain the soul of my own work and to not get all weird and rigid and overwhelmed with the whole professional side of being a therapist.

There are people I know who are seeing 10-12 clients a day, trying to pay off school loans, pay the mortgage—it can become a real grind. In private practice therapists often don’t see other therapists at all except in passing on the way to the bathroom between clients. It can be a very lonely business and it’s easy to feel isolated from the more systemic problems of the world. I do see myself as a bit of a radical and an activist, and it doesn't align very well with this ten-clients-a-day paradigm that keeps us from connecting with each other and leaves us too exhausted to think about larger world issues.
TM: Well, you might have to define psychotherapy as your own. For example, after doing therapy for a number of years I discovered I could be a writer and live that way. But I've seen myself as a therapist-writer, in the writing itself, which I try to do in a therapeutic way. Some people don't like that, but that's just the way it is.
DK: What don't they like?
TM: People think it's not substantive enough because I don't write academically or reference research studies. I'm writing therapeutically, so it doesn't look so substantive, but the average reader knows. I get feedback all the time from people saying, "This book came to me when I really needed it." I must have heard that a hundred times in the past week.
DK: That's all the evidence you need, right?
TM: It’s a different way of being a therapist. I also learned when my books began being read around the world—today it's a small globe so the books get out there—that therapy is not a narrow thing. When I work with an individual then, I really like it because it's a piece of a much bigger work that I'm doing.

After publishing Care of the Soul twenty years ago, immediately I began getting invitations to speak at medical conferences and hospitals and medical centers. I never intended to do that.
DK: That must have been surprising.
TM: It was very surprising, but you see, that's another example of what I do.
After doing therapy for a number of years I discovered I could be a writer and live that way. But I've seen myself as a therapist-writer, in the writing itself, which I try to do in a therapeutic way.
I go into a hospital or go to a medical conference. I'm the therapist really, and I'm representing the soul of the situation. So I try to work with doctors and nurses, and I listen to them and see what's going on there and I talk to them the way I would as a therapist. I talk to them about the soul of their building, "It's not doing well right now. What can we do to make it fit into this whole process more?" So all of that, to me, is therapy. Just as Socrates says that taking care of your horses and feeding them, that's what he means by therapeia or therapy, I'd say going into a hospital or going into your own home and looking it over and seeing how it is and what it needs also is therapy.

Looking at the planet and saying the planet needs us too, and we're not going to solve the problem of global warming just by convincing people that it's a moral need or your life is at stake. We need a therapy of the world. We need to be able to say, "There is reason for this. This is your home. Get motivated. Take care of it."
DK: That's not confrontational, right? Because that's not your approach.
TM: No, I don't agree with that approach.
DK: Can you say more?
TM: When we take the confrontational approach, we polarize right away. We tend then to see ourselves as right and the other person as wrong. And then we get into some type of moralistic debate that goes nowhere.

The Passion of James Hillman

DK: I think it would be interesting for our readers to know a little bit your relationship with James Hillman. It sounds like you two were very close. He was one of your teachers?
TM: He wasn't a teacher exactly, but he was a mentor. He was a friend more than anything. I met him in 1970 and I started corresponding with him in about 1973. He was living in Zurich at the time, and was sending me articles he was writing. I had been studying Jung very intensely, but I really liked Hillman's revision of Jung, the fresh direction that he took Jung's work. Then, just by accident, he and I ended up in Dallas, Texas. I was teaching at Southern Methodist University, and he got a job at the University of Dallas. So we both ended up in the same city by a fluke and that’s when we became very good friends. We did a lot of things together socially, spent a lot of time together the two of us, and we have a very similar type of temperament. Well, not temperament, but background and interests. He was very confrontational, and so when working together it was interesting because we had two very different styles. But we were passionate about the same things.
DK: What were those passions?
TM: We were passionate about psychology moving into the culture rather than just being individual. In fact he gave up doing individual therapy after a while.
DK: I didn’t realize that.
TM: He didn't agree with it.
DK: Then what did he do?
TM: “Therapy of the world,” he would call it. There's a tradition in the old writing, it's called anima mundi, the soul of the world. He picked up that theme, and he would give lectures and work with city governments, and give talks at political meetings and he would say he was bringing a “soul orientation” toward those kinds of subjects and those concerns. When we weren't in the same place, we exchanged a lot of letters and postcards because we didn't have email in those days. We were friends for over thirty-five years.
DK: You presided over his funeral, right?
TM: I did, yes. He was Jewish and he always had interesting things to say about my Catholic background, so it was kind of surprising that he would ask me to officiate at his funeral, but I think it was based on our friendship and his knowledge that we shared so many ideas about religion and psychology.
DK: My sense is that you can feel like you have much more in common with people from other religions than your own when you come from this more ecumenical place.
TM: That could be what it was, yeah. In our conversations he was always being the depth psychologist and trying to see in a deeper way what was happening in the world around him, so I learned a lot from him just being with him and used his work pretty directly at first. One big difference between us in our work was that he didn't have a very positive opinion of the spiritual dimension. He was good at criticizing it, but didn't have a real appreciation for the spiritual—and I do. So in that way we were very different.
DK: But he was into the concept of soul, right?
TM: Yes, but not in a spiritual or religious context.

“To really love a soul, even if it's weird and strange”

DK: Can you give us a sense of how you work with clients?
TM: Well, I started off by saying before that I'm not so interested in managing a person's life. That's not what I want to do. That's not how I see psychotherapy. That's something else. Psychotherapy is care of the soul. It's therapeia, serving the soul. So when someone comes to me, from the very beginning I'm interested in their soul. What are they coming in with? What's not visible? Not even what they tell me because they don't often know that deep level of themselves. So I don't just take everything at face value, but I do look for signs and try to join them. I agree with you that it’s based on love—love of the person and love of the material and what they're going through. There's a love. I learned that from Hillman—to really love a soul, whatever's going on, even if it's weird and strange.
DK: And dark.
TM: Yeah, dark. Whatever it is, you appreciate it. So I do that, and then I would say most of the time I spend working with dreams. My work is almost all dreams. It's not interpreting dreams. I don't say, "Give me your dream, and I'll tell you what it means, and we'll apply it." But I do ask people to bring their dreams because what I hear from their dream is this deeper level. That soul level comes through in their dreams. At first it takes a while to get it because the dream images are confusing initially. After a while you get to know the individual person's set of images in their dreams. I absolutely need them. I couldn't do the work without them. The dreams give us the direction to go in and what to talk about and how to understand what's happening.
DK: Does your interest in dreams stem from your study of Jung?
TM:
I've studied the imagery in religions, their stories and narratives and rituals, so when I hear a dream, I see a lot of those rituals and stories in the dream.
I think it came from Jung, yes. When I first started reading Jung, I was really taken by his own dreams, especially what he talks about in his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He talks there about his own dream work being central to his life. Instead of talking about what's going on in the external world, most of what he writes about is this dreamland, this deep fantasyland. It was very substantial and really made an impression on me. There was so much more there than if you just talk about what's happening on the surface.

His other work, especially his alchemical work, also draws on dreams and shows the connection between alchemy, mythology, and the dream. I've studied the imagery in religions, their stories and narratives and rituals, so when I hear a dream, I see a lot of those rituals and stories in the dream. This was Jung's method too, to compare an individual's dream to what you know about religion and mythology and even art.
DK: Do you bring those associations into the therapy and give them some context?
TM: Yes. You compare them or just see them interact with each other, and that helps you see much more of what's going on in a dream, which otherwise could be quite confusing. Jung felt that if you know myth and religion and the arts well, then you'll have a much better chance of working with dreams, and that’s just what I did. The first thing I did in my studies of religion was to read Jung’s collected works. After that I was able to study all of these religions and their traditions with Jung in mind. I was always thinking, "How do they speak about what's going on in the psyche and the soul?" I bring that background in religion to the dream work. Then I see what's going on in a person's life, and I can see the roots of it more.

Airplanes and Rivers

DK: Can you give an example?
TM: Sure. I write about this one in my book, and I got permission from the dreamer to make it public. This was a young man who came to me with some OCD, some obsessive compulsive practices, little rituals that he did.

The first dream he told me was that he saw these sharks in a river, and he originally wanted to go down to the river. It looked like a nice thing to do. But then when he saw the sharks, he backed away and went away from it. That was the first dream. Well, that tells us quite a bit really. Right away you've got a river, and a river itself is a tremendous image in the history of religion. There are so many great rivers. I'm not saying that his river was one of those, but knowing about those rivers you have a deeper sense of what it means in a dream to have to approach a river.

Very often it might be something like this river is the stream of your life or the stream of your time going on as you experience it. If there are sharks in it, you may not want to go into it. Obsessional practices sometimes look like people are afraid to really live. They have these practices that keep them at a distance, that keep them protected. So that gave us a lot of help right away in the very first ten minutes of working with him. Then we just keep going, more dreams, more stories, and we get deeper and deeper. Not just the surface behavior, but what's going on deep. We discuss the person's family life, childhood, and you see the themes there. A person only has so many themes in life, and they remain, they don’t change radically over the course of one’s life.
DK: And they remain in the dreams?
TM: They come and go. Dreams tend to be cyclical. You may have a series of dreams that have a certain type of imagery in them for maybe six months or up to four or five years, but then they may shift. Or they may come back again later in life. For example, I could talk about my own. I had a series of airplane dreams that lasted maybe eight years, and then they just stopped coming. So the dreams may not last forever, but it’s interesting when they stop. You can ask yourself, "Why did they stop right now?"
DK: Were yours plane crash dreams?
TM: No. My dreams were about trying to take off in a city. The planes would try to get into the air, but they weren't on an open runway. They were in a city trying to take off.
DK: And what did you come to understand about that?
TM: Well, I felt all along that I needed to adjust to the world more. I had to grow up, essentially. I had to live in the culture more. In fact, my books got me more and more into society, into people's lives. As I got more grounded in the world and in society, that dream no longer appeared.
DK: I also have recurring airplane dreams. I was just going to ask you about them.
TM: Yes, go for it.
DK: Mine are also usually in a city, and I witness a terrible plane crash. The context is always different but basically I witness these horrifying plane crashes over and over again, and I can't do anything about it, and I'm completely freaking out. It's devastating every time.
TM: See this is interesting. Can we talk about that for a minute?
DK: I would love that.
TM: So my first reaction to it is that the interesting thing about it is that you freak out. It's not that the plane crashes. I think it's okay that planes crash in the dream because sometimes that high-flying, that airy kind of existence has to come down and you crash. I would connect that with the Icarus myth, the story of Icarus who flew too high to the sun and his wings melted, and he crashed down to the earth. So there's a kind of crashing that takes place when you fly too high or when you're flying too long, that kind of thing. I wouldn't explain this dream that way, but these thoughts would be in my mind as I thought of our continuing conversations. So I would think, "Well, this is an issue where it may be necessary for planes to crash, but that really bothered you. You really have a hard time with that.”
DK: With the fall?
TM: Yeah, with the fall.
DK: That resonates with me.
TM: You used the word fall. That would take us into all that mythology of the fall that's in the book of Genesis, you know the fall of Adam and Eve. There's a lot written about the fall, a fall from innocence, or a fall from whatever. So there's so much there already just without even knowing anything personally about it. There's a lot there to think about before we go too far.

DK: It's so different from the experience of having someone go, "Well, that sounds like depression." So often we therapists get habituated to using language that really lacks imagination. Even in this one minute improvisational therapy that we just did, the myth and the story and the way that you responded just now was almost with a kind of excitement. As opposed to, "Tell me about your sleep hygiene” or “what are your automatic thoughts?" That kind of rote diagnostic way of relating to clients.
TM: Yes, exactly.

There's No Done

DK: Do you tend to see people for a long time? How does therapy end? You don't want to make them better, so how do you know that they're done?
TM: There's no done.
DK: There's no done?
TM: No. There's no done. There can't be.
DK: I like that.
TM:
Therapy is care for the soul, so it's not about seeing a particular person or using a particular method. A person may decide, "I'm not going to do this anymore," but one hopes they'll continue to care for their soul in some way.
Therapy is care for the soul, so it's not about seeing a particular person or using a particular method. A person may decide, "I'm not going to do this anymore," but one hopes they'll continue to care for their soul in some way. They may find another therapeutic thing to do. They may take up gardening or make movies or something that will really be good for their soul. In going through that process, they're going through a process very similar to what therapy is.

That's the beauty of Jung's idea of alchemy. He thought that alchemy was the model for the therapeutic process. We can go through any kind of alchemy any place in life. Getting a new job, that's an alchemical process to some extent. You have to process it, go through various stages, and so the therapy never has an end. That doesn't make any sense.
DK: Do you ever fire people?
TM: That's a good question. I don't recall that happening. No, I never did that. Most of the time when people want something, there are a couple of reasons why they would stop. One is that they want something they think I'm not giving them. They want something more specific. They wanted just the practical stuff. I tell them I can't do that. That's not what I do. I don't just say that. I try my best to go deeper into whatever it is they bring up.

On the other hand, some people just don't want to face it. If we had an hour talking about your dream, you'd have to face some things that are not so easy to do. When people hear about dream work, they think “oh, that sounds fun!” But it turns out to be very challenging and some people find it to be too much and so they just leave. I usually think that it's too bad because the process seemed to be getting somewhere.
DK: So you've been fired, but you've never fired anyone.
TM: No, I don't think so.
DK: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to share a bit yourself with our readers. It’s been fascinating.
TM: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.