The College of St. Catherine: Center for Women and Spirituality

he relationship between spirituality and psychology has an uneasy past. Can they co-exist peacefully and practically in our contemporary world? Do they complement each other? Is psychology relevant to the study and practice of spirituality? Is spirituality relevant to the study and practice of psychology?

Four members of The College of St. Catherine community – psychology professor David Schmit, theologians Ed Sellner and Catherine Michaud, and psychologist Mary Ann McLeod – met in conversation to explore these and other questions. A full transcript of their conversation may be read by clicking on the PDF icon

The following is a sampling of the transcript:

David Schmit,

PSYCHOLOGY

“In the middle of the 19th century when psychology began, the concurrency of psychology was the study of the soul. The soul was seen as having a spiritual element and a mental and a physical element. Psychology at that time was seen as the scientific investigation into this full array of the human psyche. . But later on in the century, when psychology became organized within academia, it started to change. . At the time, science was moving into an arena where there was an increasing emphasis on measurement and establishing scientific certainty. Physicalizing phenomena – focusing on events that could be studied with our sensory apparatus became the focus.

“There are four rebel psychologies. One is Jung’s Analytic Psychology, a second is Maslow’s Humanistic Psychology, a third is Transpersonal Psychology, and a fourth I’d say is parapsychology. Each of these has an interesting and illustrious history, and they all, in one degree or another, have danced around, explored, addressed, embraced, and questioned the spirituality within psychology from a psychological perspective.”

Ed Sellner,

THEOLOGY

“When I was in graduate school at Notre Dame I had the fortune of having a number of teachers that were Jungians: Morton Kelsey for one. He wrote a lot of books about the importance of Jung in terms of helping religious leaders rediscover some of the richness of the great western (and eastern) Christian tradition that scholars had gradually abandoned. This richness includes the symbolic value of myth and what today we term “paranormal” experiences, including dealing with dreams and visions and voices. Our religious traditions are rich in all of those elements. However, gradually, by the turn of the 20th century at least, there was increasingly an examination of scripture from a much more scientific view and, I think, an attempt to eliminate a lot of these experiences or discredit them as superficial if not superstitious.”

“What I see Jung offering, in terms of the world of spirituality and theology, is a number of insights I think that were no so much his alone but somewhat of a rediscovery of what was already part of many ancient traditions.”

Catherine Michaud,

THEOLOGY

“In dealing with spirituality with my students I see three problems. One is a kind of utilitarianism that characterizes our culture. We’re very practical and we think immediately in terms of fixing things. So spirituality necessarily gets lumped into one more self-help technique. . . .

“The second problem that I see or at least challenge has to do with the relationship between spirituality and religion. I am more and more distressed by that disconnect. Because I think what happens with spirituality that is disconnected from religion is a loss of tradition – a loss of the very roots that supply tools for interpreting those inner experiences. . . .

The third difficulty relates to that and I think is very much being illustrated for us today is a church that was separated from good mental health practices. So when David talks about the discipline of psychology losing its mind and its soul – well, in a way the church was doing something similar – of losing its psychology.

“So the question is what do I try to offer my students in this course that I teach regularly – Christian spirituality? There is a point in the course in which we deal with the relationship between mental health and spirituality. I try to keep it simple and clear by dealing with five major components or facets of mental health that ultimately affects the health of one’s spirituality.

Mary Ann McLeod,

DIRECTOR, COUNSELING CENTER

“I’m going to speak here from a practical perspective, not drawing on theory as much as the others of you have. When students come to see us in the counseling center they come because they are in pain. We see that as an opportunity, because the very fact that a student has come in to the counseling center indicates that she is aware that there is something wrong in her life, something she is not satisfied with.

When they come to the counseling center, many students do not check spiritual concerns. But when you actually begin speaking to them, when you meet them as individuals – as human beings—you find they frequently are dealing with questions of meaning in their lives, feelings of emptiness, feelings of discontent. . . .

In many of the professional organizations I belong to there has been a great deal of discussion about whether we have sold our birthright (in a sense) for insurance money. The way mental health concerns are put into diagnostic categories in the medical model is often inimical to dealing with the underlying malaise or pain. But students do frequently, or most frequently, come in with a desire for us to fix a symptom. . . . And the most frequent suggestion that they have about fixing it, of course, is medication. They frequently come to us already having medication prescribed by other healthcare practitioners.

“I don’t mean to sound as though medication is never appropriate. There are some mental illnesses in which medication is extremely helpful in controlling symptoms so that the individual can function and can address the more profound questions. But in my opinion, I think that the pendulum has swung way too far in the direction of medicating dissatisfaction – medicating spiritual rumblings, spiritual feelings.

[In] talking about spirituality and religion . . . I think a difference is that sometimes religion seems to be the container and spirituality the contents. The form or the structure needs the living contents or. . .the living spirit within. It should be (one hopes) that the container is somewhat flexible but still offers form. And in some ways I think psychotherapy is similar. In fact, many theorists have talked about it as “holding environment.”