ABSTRACT
All religious traditions may exert a powerful hold on their adherents when they address important psychological needs. These needs express fundamental archetypal patterns in the psyche. This chapter considers the widespread religious notions of salvation and redemption, followed by a discussion of spirit and soul from a psychological point of view. Jung pointed out that religions are psychotherapeutic systems in the sense that they help us deal with important human anxieties. Children have an innate sense of their value; they want to be treated as if they are important, as if they are what the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut called “the gleam in mother’s eye.” The concepts of spirit and soul are found in all spiritual traditions, and this suggests that they are archetypal ideas. For depth psychology, “spirit” is synonymous with the archetypal realm, which means the transpersonal principle of order and pattern in the psyche-body. Carl Jung thought of the soul as a set of psychological functions.
