Psychologising our Spirituality: Depth, Soul, and the Loss of Mystery

In my ongoing exploration of the relationship between psychology and spirituality, I have often written about the ways in which spiritual practice can be used to bypass psychological wounding — particularly where difficult emotions such as grief, rage, fear, or shame, and aspects of our humanity such as sexuality, power, and aggression, are pushed out of awareness beneath a veneer of spiritual correctness or positivity. This remains an important concern in my work, as does the way spiritual beliefs and practices can become subtly shaped by unresolved inner dynamics — what Carl Jung named the Shadow — when these are left unrecognised.

However, in this article I want to turn the lens in the other direction.

What follows is not a critique of depth psychology — that ancient and soulful tradition which understands the psyche as soul, and which offers a careful, symbolic, and compassionate attending to inner life that can profoundly support spiritual growth. Rather, this is a reflection on a more modern cultural movement: the gradual shift of psychology from an art of the soul into a predominantly scientific, explanatory discipline — concerned more with measurement and management than meaning —and the consequences of importing that style of thinking wholesale into the spiritual life.

In such a climate, spirituality can quietly lose its grounding in mystery, transcendence, and soul. The sacred is translated into intrapsychic process; myth becomes metaphor; religious practice becomes technique; and the deep questions of meaning, suffering, and surrender are reframed primarily in terms of wellbeing, regulation, or self-optimisation.

I have seen how this reduction can subtly distort the spiritual life, just as surely as spirituality can distort psychology when it is used to bypass unresolved psychological wounding. Both movements — spiritual bypassing on the one hand, and psychologisation on the other — can lead us away from wholeness.

This reflection arises from my own lived experience, and from years of listening to others in spiritual direction, where psyche and soul meet in complex, sometimes troubling, and often mysterious ways.

Psychologising the Spiritual Life

If spirituality can sometimes be used to bypass psychological work, there is also a movement in the opposite direction that deserves careful attention. In recent decades, I have found myself increasingly reflecting on the ways in which we can unhelpfully reduce the spiritual life to psychological explanation alone — a tendency that has emerged alongside the growing cultural authority of psychology itself.

We now live in a profoundly psychologised world, where psychological language, concepts, and frameworks shape how we understand almost every dimension of human experience. I have seen this shift accelerate within my own lifetime. When I went to university in the early 1980s to study psychology on my path toward becoming a Chartered Psychologist, it was not regarded as a particularly serious or prestigious discipline; my school teachers viewed it as a poor choice when set against more “proper” subjects such as English or history. Today, psychology is one of the most sought-after and fiercely competitive degree courses, and its influence permeates almost every area of contemporary life.

I value psychology deeply — both personally and professionally. Yet it is worth pausing to notice how easily its explanatory power can expand beyond its proper bounds. Psychology now appears everywhere, attached to adjacent disciplines and practices, and increasingly offered as the primary lens through which meaning, suffering, motivation, and transformation are understood.

Critical psychologists have named this cultural movement psychologisation: the tendency for human experience to be translated into psychological language and then returned to us as the most legitimate — or even the only — way of understanding ourselves. When this lens is applied uncritically to the spiritual life, something essential can be lost. Spirituality may begin to be interpreted primarily as inner process, emotional regulation, narrative construction, or psychological development — valuable dimensions, certainly, but not the whole.

In such moments, the spiritual life risks being quietly flattened, its mystery reduced to mechanism, its symbols translated too quickly into explanation, and its deeper demands of surrender, meaning, and transcendence softened into something more manageable.

Psychologisation and the Quiet Erosion of the Sacred Life

When spirituality is framed primarily as a means of psychological wellbeing, it becomes vulnerable to being shaped by the values and pressures of the surrounding culture. Practices that once oriented people toward mystery, communion, and transformation can be quietly reinterpreted through the lens of personal functioning, resilience, or self-management.

In this way, psychologisation often carries with it an unintended narrowing of the sacred. Spiritual life becomes increasingly privatised and individualised, bent subtly toward optimisation rather than surrender, coping rather than meaning, and comfort rather than conversion. What is lost is not psychology itself, but the larger horizon within which spiritual practices once asked more of us than personal wellbeing alone.

An Illustrative Example: Mindfulness and the Risk of Reduction

One way this process of psychologisation becomes visible is in the contemporary treatment of certain spiritual practices, particularly mindfulness. What was once embedded within a rich religious, ethical, and communal framework has, in many modern contexts, been lifted out of its roots and reframed almost entirely in psychological terms.

In its popularised forms, mindfulness is frequently presented as a neutral technique for emotional regulation, stress reduction, or enhanced productivity. While these outcomes are not in themselves problematic, the wider spiritual and ethical horizons from which the practice emerged are often quietly stripped away. What remains is a tool designed to help the individual cope more efficiently within existing systems, rather than a practice that invites surrender, transformation, or encounter with what lies beyond the self.

Critical psychologists have noted how this reflects a broader cultural movement in which spiritual practices are translated into psychological commodities — packaged, measured, and offered as personal resources for self-management. Ronald Purser has described this process as the “McDonaldisation” of mindfulness, while others have observed how religious disciplines can become instrumentalised in the service of personal wellbeing or success.

When this occurs, spiritual practice subtly shifts its orientation. Rather than something we give ourselves to — a path that shapes us in response to a greater mystery — it becomes something we use. The Buddhist wisdom teacher Chögyam Trungpa named this dynamic spiritual materialism: the quiet re-enlisting of spiritual language and practice in the service of the ego, even when clothed in the language of growth or wellbeing.

Logos and Mythos - Myth tells us something that is true in a timeless way, relating to humanity's experience

Logos and Mythos — Two Ways of Knowing

What psychologisation often displaces is not faith itself, but myth — a way of knowing that speaks to depth, paradox, and the timeless patterns of the soul. Another outcome of psychologisation I would like to consider is the demythologisation of our religions. Myth is an important way to relate to religious scriptures and stories, to see the deeper archetypal meaning latent within texts and imagery. Too often in our modern world we unhelpfully see myth as false or untrue. But a better way of understanding it is that myth tells a story of something that in some sense happened once but which also happens all the time. It is uncovering a timeless truth that goes beneath everyday perceptions. It is not less than true but rather tells about something in a timeless, archetypal way. Psychologisation in the service of modernity can strip away the value of myth.

In the ancient, pre-modern world both words logos and myth were used. Logos related to science, mathematics and medicine, and myth described or tried to articulate all those elements in life where there were no easy answers - puzzling, disturbing things such as death, natural disaster, inner turbulence. Myth does not explain suffering — it places us inside it.

When Myth Is Explained Away, Soul Is Lost

Engaging with mythological stories can place you in a right spiritual posture, bringing inner meaning to people. It may be, for example, we can understand Jacob wrestling with the angel or God-like figure in Genesis as something of the personal Freudian dark night of the soul experience, but it also leaves us with mystery, the sense of darkness and puzzlement we encounter in life's events, and the deep unexplainable wounding we may experience in the process. The story speaks to us of our human life experience. In Buddhism, the modern transmutation of the six realms of rebirth from ontological orders to psychological states exemplifies another way demythologisation is often continuous with psychologisation.

'Go deep into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows' Rainer Maria Rilke

Mythology also leads us deeper into the complexities of our emotions and personalities. Life may be moving along at a quick pace, when suddenly we find ourselves caught in a myth, stirring such deep feelings that we are shaken to our very foundations. Often as a spiritual director I hear people's life events and stories hark the advent of a deep story of a mythic theme. One of these I've written on recently is the 'The journey of descent.' Day by day we live emotions and themes that have deep roots, but our reflection on these experiences tends to be superficial. We can be living from a place that is too rational and dispassionate, and that loses soul.

Rainer Maria Rilke advises the young poet to 'go deep into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.' Our modern tendency is to numb ourselves to the intensity of myth or to reduce it to psychological symbolism, creating the illusion that grand pleasures and terrible torments are mere products of a field of sensation wholly psychological and therefore only tangentially, if at all, real. The modern person has a difficult time finding a place in life for the soul’s symbolic language, especially as it emerges in dreams, because this is all unconscious material — rich with symbolic meaning — yet too easily dismissed as merely psychological and therefore irrelevant to the deeper life of the soul. Our interior lives have become disenchanted by this rationalisation of the soul's milieu. Perhaps we unhelpfully disenchant stories when we explain them away, by for example a preacher reducing a biblical story to a moral or a psychoanalyst by explaining it according psychological theory.

Depth Psychology as Companion, Not Replacement

None of this is a rejection of psychology, nor of the careful attending to the psyche that depth psychology has long offered the spiritual life. On the contrary, when held within a wider horizon of meaning, depth psychology can serve as a vital ally — helping us listen more honestly to the soul, recognise unconscious dynamics, and honour the symbolic and imaginal dimensions of experience without reducing them to explanation alone. What is lost in psychologisation is not psychology itself, but the sense that the soul is finally held within mystery — that it is not fully knowable, measurable, or manageable, but participates in something greater than itself.

Depth Spiritual Direction as a Home for Soul and Mystery

For me, spiritual direction —particularly this depth approach to spiritual direction — is an anam cara space, a place of soul-friendship open to both spirit and soul, logos and mythos, where we are invited to live a more deeply reflected life. It is a space in which we may find our own spiritual belonging and direction, not by resolving life’s questions too quickly, but by ever more deeply consenting to God’s presence as we journey within the unfolding mystery of life itself.