Jungian influenced therapists and Buddhists in dialogue

This paper presents the findings from the second of an ongoing series of focus group encounters between spiritually minded counsellors and those engaged in pastoral care within a religious tradition. For this study we recruited five Jungian influenced therapists and three pastoral care workers two of whom were explicitly Buddhists. The data was analysed by thematic analysis and seven main themes emerged: spirituality, its meaning, developing it and talking about it in therapy; what do we mean by God, self and other cultural questions; doing Buddhist pastoral care; Jungian therapy practice; comparisons and differences between therapy and pastoral care; the practice and its dilemmas including experiencing ‘we’ space; and professional identity and spiritual affiliation. These main themes represent a strong case for the acceptance of client’s spirituality within either a therapeutic or Buddhist framework with a clear sense of how to support the client and their developmen