Abstract

The problem. The purpose of this study was to investigate to what extent A Course in Miracles, a three-volume self-taught course of spiritual psychotherapy, fulfills a need for a psychospiritual understanding of self and healing in a response to the psychodynamic instinct/conflict/relational model, many of whose concepts are contained in the Course. The question was posed, if the Course does offer an integrative response to an assumed need for a paradigm in which soul is linked to materiality, what are the benefits for a definition of a psychospiritual healing process? ;Method. The dissertation is a hermeneutical study of Freudian thought and A Course in Miracles. Chapter 1 examines the historical paradigms of dualism and non-dualism from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes and Freud, identifying the ways in which these paradigms have influenced the contemporary Western paradigm of biological materialism. An overview of A Course in Miracles examines its origins as well as its metaphysical and ontological assumptions, which echo Platonic views on Reality and soul. ;Chapter 2 reviews the literature on Freud, ego-, self-, object relations psychology and A Course in Miracles, seeking to articulate the ways in which the Course responds dialectically to the instinct/conflict/relational model. ;Results. Dialectically, psychodynamic thought and the thought of the Course stand in a relationship which points toward synthesis. Once the dialectic is established between psychodynamic and Course views of self and healing, what occurs is an integration which serves as a new thesis. That new thesis, the psychospiritual model found in A Course in Miracles, articulates a more optimistic view of the human person, whose ontological reality is eternal, unchanging spirit. The goal of psychotherapy, then, becomes the discovery of that true Self through the vehicle of forgiveness in relationship