Spirituality in Clinical Practice: Incorporating the Spiritual Dimension in Psychotherapy and Counseling

by Len Sperry

Spirituality in Clinical Practice includes perspectives not found in other texts such as a developmental perspective integrating moral and spiritual development, the interface of spiritual development with personality functioning, and insights from object relations, self psychology and transpersonal psychotherapy as they relate to various spiritual traditions and contemporary spiritual practices. This brief, reader-friendly text is written in a highly accessible style and is destined to set a precedent for excellence in the emerging field of spirituality in clinical practice or psychotherapy and counseling.

224 pages, Paperback

First published April 6, 2001

Reviews

[Andrew Montgomery · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was a lot I liked about this book, but there were also some weaknesses that made this book less helpful than it could have been for me. I loved the clinical presentation of spirituality, which is, of course, the point of the whole book. While this presentation did not necessarily give me a new framework within which to understand spirituality, it did give me some helpful language to articulate spirituality in clinical ways (e.g., the developmental models). It also exposed me to some movements in psychology that I didn't know about, like transpersonal psychology. I hope to do more reading to learn what that is and if it has acceptance within the wider psychology world. On a related note, I saved a bunch of articles that this book cited that I look forward to reading in the future, and I think that will be one of my biggest takeaways from this book and probably the only reason I would return to it.

What I didn't like about this book is that it often times read like a series of lists, and I had a hard time following what the author's main point was in each chapter. This was particularly prominent in the chapter on developmental models of spirituality. I thought this book would have been better if the author had simply taken one (or maybe two) of the theories/frameworks presented in list form and spend more time with it rather than information dump all of them into a single chapter. Because this book was so list-heavy, I think I would have a hard time articulating the author's main points beyond the idea that spirituality is important in clinical practice, which I could have gathered from the title.