Psyche & Spirituality

“A spirituality that does not take into account and engage with the complexities and dynamic nature of the psyche, in which our bodily life plays such an important part, will fail to touch people who are not incurably romantic. It will remain, in the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut’s felicitous phrase, experience-distant rather than experience-near. Equally, a psychology that refuses to recognize the potentialities of the psyche, of its possible extension into the realm of the spirit, a psychology which contents itself with Freud’s healing offer of replacing hysterical misery with common unhappiness, does not provide enough emotional sustenance to modern man.”—Sudhir Kakar, from the introduction to his book, Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009)