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Counselling and psychotherapy

Divine therapy?

Janet Sayers on the potential of a meeting of psychoanalysis, neuropsychology and religion.

18 September 2003

Like many psychologists I do not believe in God. But I am intrigued by religious and mystical experience. I am also happy to credit the healing effects of the revelatory experience of feeling oneself at one with nature, or with God. The Archbishop of Canterbury says revelation challenges ‘the pretension of consciousness to constitute itself’. It invites us into a world not of our own choosing. Revelation ‘is essentially to do with what is generative in our experience’ (Williams, 1986/1999 p.134). What, however, does psychology tell us about the hard-wiring of such experience in the brain?

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