St. Ignatius as psychotherapist? How Jesuit spirituality and wisdom can enhance psychotherapy

The great wisdom traditions associated with various religious and spiritual practices and institutions have offered a variety of helpful strategies for more effective living and coping with life’s many challenges. In most recent times, efforts to secularize these strategies have been made in order to appeal to the general population as well as to secular mental health professionals as tools for their clinical practices. Although mindfulness meditation and yoga are perhaps the most notable examples, many other intervention strategies have been and can be borrowed from various religious and spiritual traditions to use in a secular manner if so desired. In this brief reflection, the wisdom and a few of the strategies of St. Ignatius, the founder of the Roman Catholic religious order called the Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits, are offered with examples presented in and for clinical practice