ABSTRACT
https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315808635/d072e771-52a2-41e8-9ef0-430f27b9a843/content/ch14_page301_01_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>Conflicts between sexual inclinations and religious prohibitions are commonplace. Resolution of such concerns may be beyond the scope of much conventional, Western, religious teaching or the purview of mainstream psychotherapy. Spirituality is often absent from clinical discussion of such issues and conspicuously so in the sex therapy literature. The spiritual dimension of living is evident among human beings whenever there is an awareness of a broader life meaning that goes beyond the immediacy of everyday expediency and material concerns. This awareness is more likely to emerge from a therapeutic approach that plumbs the depth of human experience rather than one that merely adjusts sexual behaviors so that individuals and couples can function more adequately. This chapter will illustrate how the artificial divide between sex and religion can be healed in the form of spirituality, evoked in an existential-humanistic approach to psychotherapy. A case will be presented of a married woman torn between her sadomasochistic desires and her Catholic value system, and will demonstrate how she transcended this dilemma in experiential psychotherapy (Mahrer, 1989, 1996, 2002, 2004).
