Focused Discussions
Religious Community as Resilient Spiritual Experience Despite Social Distance: Testimonies of Parishioners in a Catholic Community of Lima during the COVID-19 Pandemic View Digital Media
Focused Discussion Juan Dejo Bendezú
The research is focused on the relationship between the individual experience of the spiritual dimension and the community activities of religious practices. The proposal is based on the study of a set of community service practices carried out at the peak of the COVID19 pandemic, in a Jesuit Catholic church from one of Lima’s outskirts, Peru. The authors seek to show the social character of the religious phenomenon as stated in studies carried out from the perspective of historical anthropology from an evolutionary outlook. According to this line of thought, since the origin of the human species, religion is a behavior that remains deeply rooted in societies, due to the role it plays through practices of social cohesion. Despite social distancing, COVID19 has made it possible to show how important these spiritual practices are to achieve mental balance out of community cohesion, even though in an exceptional way through virtual support.
Spirituality in Mental Health: Integrating Spiritual Healing Practices and Mental Health Services View Digital Media
Focused Discussion Rebecca Vicente
The purpose of this session is to acknowledge and examine how spiritual healing practices are often used in conjunction with traditional mental health services, often without an integration of the two. This session seeks to show and explain how marrying the two is not only effective for healing, but often more powerful than mental health services alone. We explore why leaving out discussion of spirituality and indigenous healing practices in mental health training is detrimental to not only the client, but the clinician as well. We will focus in on shamanic medicine practices.
Five Approaches to Religion and Spirituality in the Psychoanalytic Setting: Sensitizing Clinicians to Their Patients' Spiritual Sensibilities View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Samuel L. Pauker, M.D.
It’s ironic that psychoanalysis, which focuses on the individual’s “unknown”—the unconscious—is a field where religion and spirituality have been suspect ever since Freud discounted religion as a collective neurosis. Yet even patients who don't practice traditional religion usually have spiritual sensibilities. Despite the difficulty of putting such ethereal matters into words, to not acknowledge or address our patients' spiritual yearnings and beliefs is to cast them off as inconsequential and to ignore and deny them a potentially rich, deep exploration of a significant and complex part of their lives. In this presentation, I discuss the most common ways religious references surface in psychotherapy, the five main paradigms psychoanalysts adhere to which inform their clinical work, and why sensitizing psychotherapists and psychoanalysts to signals of spirituality is so important. Psychoanalytic work is not merely intended to analyze the linear and logical. We are dedicated to acknowledging the sub-lingual, unconscious, and oceanic sensations that are intangible but very real to our patients. Enhancing clinical awareness of the ways religion and spirituality influence our patients' personal narratives, thinking, behavior, and personality is especially important today because we no longer live in a world where belief systems are solely focused on institutional religion. The spiritual sensibilities our patients bring into the office may not fit into traditional definitions. It's the psychoanalyst's job to be attuned to the spiritual dynamics at work in our patients' psyches and avoid the professionally-honed tendency to think analytically and reductionistically about spiritual feelings and experiences.
