Psychoanalysis, Attachment and the Relationship with God

Using Psychoanalytic Techniques to Transform the Attachment Relationship to God demonstrates how clinicians can use Attachment-Informed Psychotherapy (AIP) to enhance clients’ understanding of their relationship to God and significant others.

Geoff Goodman discusses four distinct attachment relationships to the God of personal spiritual experience and explains the implications for working with clients in psychotherapy. By asking how therapists can work through clients’ attachment relationship to God as a displacement of their attachment relationships to parents, and how therapists can work through clients’ attachment relationships to parents as a displacement of their attachment relationship to God, this book provides unique insight into the therapeutic process. Goodman’s objective is to enable clinicians to transform these attachment relationships, restoring and unity – a crucial treatment goal of AIP.

Using Psychoanalytic Techniques to Transform the Attachment Relationship to God will be a valuable resource for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, marriage and family therapists, and pastoral counsellors in practice and in training.

Practical Applications of Transforming the Attachment Relationship to God discusses four distinct attachment relationships to the God of personal spiritual experience and considers how each of these relationships has implications for working with clients in psychotherapy.

Geoff Goodman uses Attachment-Informed Psychotherapy (AIP) to explore the connection between a relationship to God and a relationship to caregivers during childhood. By analyzing the attachment relationships evident in the lives of four public figures - human rights activist Coretta Scott King, Jewish Holocaust victim Anne Frank, Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill W., and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud - this book demonstrates how their attachment relationships with their caregivers during childhood helped to determine the quality of their attachment relationship (or non-relationship) to God. Goodman demonstrates how to use AIP to work with these attachment relationships, formulating a psychotherapeutic treatment plan for each one with a goal of restoring wholeness and unity.

Practical Applications of Transforming the Attachment Relationship to God will be a valuable resource for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and marriage and family therapists in practice and in training.