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Religion and Treatment Strategy

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  Douglas Whitcher Ph.D, C. G Jung Institute Zürich    This is a story from life, and some dreams that went along with it:  Part I: A woman finds the love of her life and a few months later he is dead.  She dreams that she is walking into the forest and she is terrified by a wild boar lurking behind the bushes.  Part II: She struggles to cope with the cruelty of what just happened to her.   She dreams that she orders food at a restaurant. She is served wild boar. In a typical nightmare we dream of scary monsters, demons, and sinister figures that threatened to swallow, engulf, or kidnap us. The dream poses a challenge: to escape from the clutches of the monster. In the process of doing so, we are forced to leave the confines of our comfort zone in order to become familiar with a world that we previously avoided, being dangerous, uncanny, threatening. By becoming more familiar with the creatures of darkness, we learn something new, possibly of great value for our further journey, someth
Religion and Clinical Strategy C.G. Jung Institute Zürich Fall Semester 2021 Instructor: Douglas Whitcher, Ph.D. Training Analyst “Religion is like a cow; it gives milk, but it kicks too” Buddhist saying Course description: Practitioners depend on clinical strategies to explain mental disease to their patients. When a shaman explains his patient’s psychosis as the result of having been abducted by the land-otters, his instrument is myth. When a neurologist explains depression as the result of depletion of serotonin, his instrument is myth. Clinical strategies need to be informed by the evidence-based science available, but they also have to draw on the cultural background of their patients, that is, belief-systems. We have to understand how religion, explicitly or implicitly, influences the course of illness. Analytical psychology distinguishes itself from other clinical strategies by its emphasis on the use of religion to plan treatment.  If you try to define religion, you will find