I am grateful to an early editor of this book who noted that it is really three books in one, with three interweaving theses that can easily get lost in the details of the argument. It might help to spell out these theses at the outset, and to show how they might matter to you, the reader, and to our current historical moment.
The first and central thesis is that Jacob Boehme (1575–1624 CE), the mystical shoemaker from Gorlitz, Germany, is basically the originator of the psychodynamic therapies of Freud and Jung, including their respective maps of the soul, their concepts of the unconscious mind, their contention that dreams and imagination are primary modes of unconscious expression, and their resultant stages of (Freudian) psychosexual and (Jungian) psychospiritual development.
For scholars, I hope this thesis will be exciting because, up to this point, we have traced the influences on Freud and Jung back to nineteenth century German and English Romanticism—to philosophers like Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, to poets like Goethe, Schiller, Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and to a group of romantic medical doctors that most people have never heard of. The scholarly consensus is that psychodynamic therapy emerged as a bricolage of piecemeal contributions from these various influences. My claim is that the roots of psychodynamic therapy go much further back, not to nineteenth century art, philosophy, and medicine, but to seventeenth century theology, and specifically to the Lutheran mystical theology, or “theosophy,” of Jacob Boehme. Boehme’s theology is a remarkable mixture of the Lutheran biblical mythos, kabbalah, alchemy, astrology, and direct experience of God’s presence in the natural world and the soul, all mediated through the ubiquitous figure of divine Sophia. With Boehme psychodynamic therapy emerges from a theological and mystical matrix, not as a piecemeal bricolage, but basically whole.
For therapists, I hope this thesis will be exciting because spiritually integrated therapy is no longer just a novel approach or modality, but a necessary perspective that is informing all modalities. As a therapist myself, I notice that clients increasingly bring their spiritual perspectives and experiences into the consulting room, and I believe we need to meet them where they are. We now have abundant evidence that mental health issues can arise from spiritual distress, and likewise that spirituality can offer remarkable resources for healing. As a teacher in a psychospiritual therapy training program at the University of Toronto, I am heartened by the number of gifted students who are eager to seriously engage both religious traditions and psychotherapeutic theories, and to explore where they are mutually informing. These students are bringing substance to Jung’s early idea that religions are the great psychotherapeutic systems of humanity.
Hopefully this book will show that Western psychotherapy, since its inception, was itself deeply religious, although Freud and Jung, either knowingly or unknowingly, concealed its spiritual and mystical pedigree to make it more palatable to the scientific ethos of their time. Today the time is ripe to reveal the hidden spiritual roots of Western psychotherapy, as we bring it into conversation with the diverse global religious traditions of our clients. And Boehme is just the person to help us in this task. Even in the seventeenth century he was attempting to bring peace to the religious violence of his time: not only between Catholics and Protestants, but between Christians, Jews, Muslims, and so-called Pagans. This work is still vital.
Some therapists today claim that Freud and Jung are outmoded. I occasionally hear, often from graduates of psychology departments, that psychodynamic therapy is no longer an “evidence based” approach, and that today’s “gold standard” is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). But these claims are aging badly. Studies continue to show that the benefits of psychodynamic therapy are at least as large as those of the manualized therapies branded as “evidence based.” Further, the common factors literature suggests that therapeutic techniques only account for about fifteen percent of a therapy’s healing effects. Other factors, like empathy and the client-therapist relationship, are much more important. Freud and Jung knew this long ago, which is why they wrote so much about the therapeutic relationship and tended to eschew formulaic techniques. Psychodynamic approaches are not as good at creating the large data sets that have helped CBT dominate the scientific literature, but I think they still have a lot to teach us, not least about the presence of sacred realities within the human psyche.
My second thesis, which is mostly outlined in the footnotes, is that Jacob Boehme has been unjustly marginalized by historians, and this is partly because of the early and sensational charges of heresy against him, and particularly against his first devotional text, the Aurora, which was circulated in hand-copied manuscripts among a small group of followers, and came to the attention of a contentious local clergyman. It is not that I see heterodoxy as a particularly negative thing, since outliers often have an insightful view of the mainstream, but this label overlooks some important facts. For example, in the final year of his life, Boehme was warmly welcomed by the Lutheran theological intelligentsia in Dresden, which was then the “Rome” of Lutheranism. According to Boehme, the members of the Dresden consistory loved his writings and assured him of their support. Even if Boehme is exaggerating here, we can be sure that he was not admonished or imprisoned by these defenders of Lutheran doctrine, who were not exactly known for broad-minded tolerance. But the label of heterodoxy still clings to Boehme’s work, and the result is that his work has been segregated by historians, and associated with many other segregating labels, like Gnosticism, pantheism, theosophy, occultism, and especially “esotericism.”
Again, there is a kernel of truth in many of these terms, including “esotericism,” since Boehme’s work eventually became influential among various secretive groups, like Freemasonry. But there is also a deep falsehood, in that Boehme never intended his work to be segregated in this way, and he certainly did not intend it to become the preserve of a secretive elite, a misinterpretation that has become deeply problematic. On the contrary, Boehme saw himself as the “philosopher of the simple folk (Philosophus der Einfältigen)” (Aurora 18.80), someone who was continuing the Reformation impulse toward a “priesthood of all believers” and a radically democratized access to the sacred. This explains the influential role of Boehme’s writings in the English Revolution (1640–1660 CE), among dissenting groups who were trying to give “the commons”—including common agricultural lands—back to the common people, through the establishment of a true Commonwealth.
As someone who was trained in theology, I see Boehme’s work as quite orthodox, and I have included a chapter on Augustine, the father of Western orthodoxy, to help flesh this out. Augustine of Hippo may be the West’s most prolific psychotherapist, and he was certainly the most influential Christian theologian of the medieval and early modern periods, for both Catholics and Protestants. But certain aspects of Augustine’s vast corpus, like his doctrine of Sophia, and his theory of dreams and their interpretation, are not well known today, and will be highlighted in what follows.
What makes Boehme unique then is not so much his deviation from accepted doctrine, or from the Augustinian tradition, but something much more radical. Boehme transposes theology into an entirely new key by incorporating the symbolic world of dreams and the imagination, and thus marrying logos with Sophia. Boehme attempts to understand the cognitive doctrinal clashes of his day, which were causing untold brutality and violence, by getting beneath them, so to speak, to their mythical core. He incorporates what Freud later called “primary process thinking” into theology, and the result is what I call a “psycho-mythical” theology, which sees the image-based thinking of the imagination as more primary than language-based thought. All of this is part of Boehme’s attempt to give theology, and God, back to the people, and it is relevant for spiritually integrated therapy today. Having explored countless dreams of clients, students, and friends, I can certainly say that dreams are a radically democratic phenomenon. They send the most extraordinary wisdom to each of us, and reveal a profoundly sacred core in the soul that is personalized to each unique human struggle and life path, if we have ears to hear them.
This leads me to the third thesis, which is that the world of dreams forms a connecting link between Boehme, Freud, and Jung. Along with certain strands of historical influence, the dreamworld itself may explain some of the deep continuities between these thinkers and their respective understandings of the soul. My own life experience enters the picture here, in that, after a series of profound tragedies as a young adult, my dreams became extremely active and vivid. And my attempts to understand these dreams with several therapists led to a remarkable awakening and expansion of awareness, wherein I realized that the dreamworld is every bit as real and detailed as the waking world. Westerners tend to see dreams as a somewhat strange and random commentary on waking life, but it may be that the waking world takes its place within the larger boundary of the dream. This latter view seems to be espoused by countless global cultures and spiritual traditions that pay special attention to the dreamworld as a place of spirits and ancestors, and a particular locus of the sacred. I am hoping that this book will help therapists put Freud, Jung, and psychodynamic therapy into conversation with these global cultures and spiritual traditions, and help therapists understand clients who were shaped by these cultures and traditions. As a therapist, I have yet to meet a client who was not profoundly moved by sacred impulses, often operating just below the threshold of consciousness. And I suspect it is time for Western therapists to begin attending to these impulses with integrity, precision, and care. If this book is helpful in that endeavor, I will certainly be grateful.