Book excerpt: At a time when psychotherapy seems to be a purely secular pursuit with no connection to the sacred, The Sacred Cauldron makes the startling claim that, for both participants, psychotherapeutic work is actually a spiritual discipline in its own right. The psyche manifests the sacred and provides the transpersonal field within which the work of therapy is carried out. This book demonstrates some of the ways in which a spiritual sensibility can inform the technical aspects of psychotherapy. "The Sacred Cauldron is truly a book to be read by both therapists and non-therapists, for it offers a thoughtful, intelligent, sensitive passage through the spiritual quarrels and complexities of our time and addresses our common summons, which is to treat the life of the spirit with the respect, the gravity, and the centrality it deserves. This book is instructive to all, for Corbett not only marshals a wealth of scholarship and clinical experience, but also expresses challenging insights through a calm, reasonable, and commonsense appeal. After this book, the reader will be more thoughtful, more considered, more sophisticated, more appreciative of the importance of therapy as a vehicle for healing and for engaging the numinous." --James Hollis, Ph.D., Jungian analyst and author of What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life Dr. Lionel Corbett trained in medicine and psychiatry in England and as a Jungian analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago. He is currently on the core faculty of Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California, and the author of The Religious Function of the Psyche and Psyche and the Sacred, as well as various professional articles. His main interest is in the religious function of the psyche and the ways in which this function expresses itself through the structures of personality.