Minding Spirituality

Re-imagining Integration: Student and Faculty Perspectives on Integration Training at Christian Doctoral Programs

“…A postmodern frame also posits integration as something that is experientially learned and “embodied” in the integrator as opposed to specific techniques and interventions cognitively taught. Our research findings resonate with Sorenson’s (2004a) work on therapists’ use of God-image. Sorenson demonstrated how student therapists’ God concept influenced how they worked with their clients’ religious issues (e.g., those with distant and cold images of God had less comfort addressing religious issues).…”

“…However, most notably, Sorenson’s findings in a program where personal psychotherapy is required revealed that students’ experiences of how their own therapists handled religious and spiritual issues in the students’ personal therapy were more important than students’ God concepts in determining how they worked with religious and spiritual issues with their clients. The relational experience with their personal therapist, and how they handled issues of spirituality had the largest influence in shaping these future integrators (Sorenson 2004a). Our correlational findings support the idea that integration has a formative, experiential, and transformational element.…”

Bienvenues to Psychology and Religion: Why Psychology Can Lead to Critical Collaboration, Not Necessarily Atheism

“…Have academic psychological observations and analyses about religious belief in this past century been skewed by the individual psychology of one of its founding fathers? Sorenson (2004) has detailed the impact of Freud's theories in contributing to a strong antireligious sentiment in psychology up until roughly the 1970s. But research in developmental psychology during the past 40 years has influenced the psychology of religion, especially demonstrating that an understanding of personal psychology influences personal religious beliefs, or the lack thereof.…”

The Wager of Faith in Fiction and Psychoanalysis: Reading Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary

“…More recently, however, there seems to have been what Starr () calls a ‘gradual rapprochement’ between the two fields of study, where a cultural shift away from compliance with traditional religious doctrine towards respect for the individual's own inner spiritual orientation has allowed both religion and psychoanalysis to acknowledge the role faith may play in psychic change and transformation. Contemporary psychoanalysts such as Eigen (), Ghent (), Neri (), Safran (, ), Sorenson () and Spezzano and Gargiulo (), among others, have integrated their theological interests with psychoanalytic theory alongside religious scholars such as Ostow () and Zornberg (, ), who have drawn from psychoanalysis in their understanding of religious belief.…”