This edited collection addresses how therapy can engage with issues of race, culture, religion and spirituality. It is a response to the need for practitioners to further their understanding and skills base in developing ways of appropriately responding to the interconnectivity of these evolving issues.

Integrating Spirituality into Counseling uses the Christian tradition as a starting point for developing a universal frame of reference and is predominantly based on an existential approach to counseling, one that is applicable to several faith traditions as well as spiritual but nonreligious audiences. The chapters of this book proceed from the theoretical toward the more practical, in a logical fashion, allowing a clear distinction between different topics, starting from meta-reflection and finishing with practical applications. The design of the book allows students to focus on whatever is of importance to them; each chapter is self-contained and can be read independently of the others. Integrating Spirituality into Counseling is designed for students of counseling, pastoral care, spirituality, theology, and chaplaincy. It will provide readers with the tools they need to work with spiritual issues across traditions. Students will also find advice for when to refer clients to religious leaders or ministers, and they’ll also deepen their understanding of the ways in which spirituality influences one’s life.

The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures explores central lines of enquiry and seminal scholarship on therapeutic cultures, popular psychology, and the happiness industry. Bringing together studies of therapeutic cultures from sociology, anthropology, psychology, education, politics, law, history, social work, cultural studies, development studies, and American Indian studies, it adopts a consciously global focus, combining studies of the psychologisation of social life from across the world. Thematically organised, it offers historical accounts of the growing prominence of therapeutic discourses and practices in everyday life, before moving to consider the construction of self-identity in the context of the diffusion of therapeutic discourses in connection with the global spread of capitalism. With attention to the ways in which emotional language has brought new problematisations of the dichotomy between the normal and the pathological, as well as significant transformations of key institutions, such as work, family, education, and religion, it examines emergent trends in therapeutic culture and explores the manner in which the advent of new therapeutic technologies, the political interest in happiness, and the radical privatisation and financialisation of social life converge to remake self-identities and modes of everyday experience. Finally, the volume features the work of scholars who have foregrounded the historical and contemporary implication of psychotherapeutic practices in processes of globalisation and colonial and postcolonial modes of social organisation. Presenting agenda-setting research to encourage interdisciplinary and international dialogue and foster the development of a distinctive new field of social research, The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in the advance of therapeutic discourses and practices in an increasingly psychologised society.

What place does spiritual need and healing have in the counselling room? Denying the spiritual dimension of personal distress can be potentially hurtful to clients, but the issue of spirituality is also fraught with professional and ethical issues for therapists. This book draws on original research to move the debate about spiritual need forwards in relation to therapeutic practice, supervision, and training. An international team of contributors offer a diverse range of perspectives to critically explore a wide spectrum of spiritual issues, including prayer, pastoral care and traditional healing. Edited by a leading figure in the field, this book: - Illuminates experiences of both clients and practitioners through detailed case vignettes - Draws on cutting-edge research in this growing field - Invites readers to address their own therapeutic practice with hands-on discussion points This measured and thoughtful approach provides a fascinating insight to an often complex and controversial topic. As such, the book is essential reading for trainees and practitioners of counselling and psychotherapy.

By focusing on quantitative and qualitative research in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, this book expands on the notion of "therapeutic culture." Usually considered a global phenomenon disseminated from North to South, and associated to "modern" forms of "psychologized" subjectivity, "therapeutic culture" has become a key notion to understanding contemporary culture. However, this path-breaking research, grounded in a bottom-up perspective that follows specific therapeutic narratives, shows that the concept of the "therapeutic" should be extended to encompass a diversity of practices, both "secular" and "religious," "modern" and "traditional," that are deemed as therapeutic by the actors involved, although they are overlooked as such by most of the current literature. Pentecostal and Afro-Brazilian religions as well as New Age practices coexist and interact with "conventional" therapeutic techniques such as Psychoanalysis, conforming complex and hybrid therapeutic networks associated to different (also hybrid) forms of subjectivity. Although the book draws upon two cases from the "Global South," its theoretical conclusions are applicable to the analysis of the realm of the therapeutic at large. The book is aimed at university students (both graduate and undergraduate) and at the general public interested in the notion of the therapeutic and, specifically, in Latin American culture.

First published in 2004. Therapy Culture explores the powerful influence of therapeutic imperative in Anglo-American societies. In recent decades virtually every sphere of life has become subject to a new emotional culture. Professor Furedi suggests that the recent cultural turn towards the realm of the emotions coincides with a radical redefinition of personhood. Increasingly, vulnerability is presented as the defining feature of people's psychology. Terms like 'at risk', 'scarred for life' or 'emotional damage' evoke a unique sense of powerlessness. Furedi questions widely accepted thesis that the therapeutic culture is primarily about imposing a new conformity through the management of people's emotions. Through framing the problem of everyday life through the prism of emotions, therapeutic culture incites people to feel powerless and ill. Drawing on developments in popular culture, political and social life, Furedi provides a path-breaking analysis of the therapeutic turn.

The contributors, who each work with spiritual issues, either explicitly as spiritual directors or accompaniers, or as an implicit part of their therapeutic work, offer a psychologically-informed approach to Spiritual Accompaniment and Direction, and to working with others on a spiritual level more generally. They explore what it means to be attuned to the spiritual process of another, discuss what makes an effective relationship in Spiritual Accompaniment and counselling, and consider how best to work with spiritual crisis, spiritual abuse, and pain. The unconscious process informing the work, forgiveness, changing spiritual needs over the life-span, and models of supervision that can inform the practice of Spiritual Accompaniment are also explored. A case study is presented, providing psychological and theological insights into the accompaniment process. Grounded in work with the spiritual dimension of others and aspiring to improve encounters at a spiritual level, this concise book has important implications for the practice of counsellors, psychotherapists, and spiritual accompaniers and directors.

This book contributes to research on therapeutic culture by drawing on longstanding ethnographic work and by offering a new theoretical reading of therapeutic culture in today's society. It suggests that the therapeutic field serves as a key site in which a number of contradictions of capitalism are confronted and lived out. It shows that therapeutic engagements are inherently ambivalent and contradictory, as they can be articulated and engaged with in many different ways and harnessed for diverse, and often contradictory, political projects. The book takes issue with the interpretation of therapeutic culture as merely individualising, depoliticizing and working in congruence with neoliberalism, and shows that therapeutic engagements may also open up a space for contestation and critique of neoliberal capitalism, animate collective action for social change and articulate alternative forms of life and subjectivities. The book will speak to a wide variety of audiences in the social sciences and will be of particular interest to those working in the fields of sociology, anthropology, critical psychology, cultural studies, gender studies, and critical social theory.

For the past half century, intellectuals and other critics have lamented America s descent into a therapeutic cultureor in Christopher Lasch s lasting phrase, a culture of narcissism. But is that the case? The essays in this collection take a fresh look at therapeutic culture and its critiques. Rather than a cesspool of self-involvement, therapeutic culture may instead be a productive and meaningful way that people negotiate with issues of culture, society, race, gender, and identity. Most important, the editors and contributors grapple with the historically and socially constructed nature of therapeutic culture and its influence. With its dazzling array of contributors and perspectives, this is a book worth getting off the couch for."

Mark Walia's A Tale of Two Cultures: Islam and the West lays out the contrasts between the Western and Islamic worlds with remarkable clarity and documentation, and concludes there are nearly irreconcilable differences between these worlds. keywords: Islam, Muslim, Religion, Christianity, War, Culture, Travel, Sharia, Hate, Mohammed