The Search for Meaning in Psychotherapy: Spiritual Practice, the Apophatic Way and Bion [Paperback]

Preface; Introduction; Part One: The listening cure: Psychotherapy as spiritual practice 1 Spirituality and psychotherapy 2 An open heart and an open Hearth: Towards an ethic of analytic hospitality 3 The listening cure: Presence, awareness, attention 4 The state of contemplation and analytic reverie 5 Some Buddhist teachings on meditation 6 Primordial purity and spontaneous presence: The Great Perfection of Dzogchen 7 I do not exist: Zknyat
and the terror of non-being 8 Bearing the unbearable, imagining the unimaginable: Intergenerational transmission of trauma Part Two: A Ray of Divine Darkness: Psychotherapy and the Apophatic Way 9 The trace of the infinite in the face of the Other: L?vinas ethics of alterity 10 The origins of the apophatic way 11 The apophatic mysticism of Dionysius 12 The apophatic way after Dionysius 13 Transcending all knowledge: St John of the Cross 14 Apophatic contemplation in Christianity 15 Apophatic epistemology in Bion 16 Without memory, desire or understanding: A commentary 17 Bions O and the apophatic way; Inconclusion

If, when a patient enters therapy, there is an underlying yearning to discover a deeper sense of meaning or purpose, how might the therapist rise to such a challenge? As both Carl Jung and Wilfred Bion observed, the patient may be asking something of the therapist that is intrinsically spiritual as well as psychotherapeutic.

Judith Pickering is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, analytical psychologist, couple therapist and scholar of religious studies working in private practice in Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Being in Love: Therapeutic Pathways Through Psychological Obstacles to Love (Routledge, 2008) and has over forty years experience in meditation, prayer and contemplation.

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