Spiritual Threads in Psychotherapeutic Work

Secular Spirituality: An Attachment/Psychoanalytic Viewpoint

In this video talk with slides, atheist Dr Jeremy Holmes reflects on the human impulse towards religion and spiritual belief and discusses how God, as a reflection of a good internalized object, can be a great source of support and solace during life’s inevitable losses and trials. Other concepts of God, as punitive or all seeing, could reflect adaptive attachment responses such as anxious or insecure and result in phenomena such as fundamentalism that Holmes refers to as ‘defensive spirituality.’ Holmes is an advocate of what he calls ‘secular spirituality’, a form of being in contact with the self that is beyond words, but that can embrace not just the concept of God but also nature, art, music, literature and dance – anything that is sensed as beautiful and not of the self.