Psyche and the Sacred

What if the missing piece to robust mental health isn't more psychotherapy, but rather engaging the spirit and soul?
In Psyche and the Sacred, Samuel Bendeck Sotillos issues a powerful critique of modern psychology’s narrow, materialist worldview and offers a bold, much-needed alternative: a return to the sacred foundations of the world’s wisdom traditions. Drawing from cross-cultural “sciences of the soul,” Sotillos argues that true mental health cannot be achieved through Western psychology’s secular lens alone. Instead, he urges a re-grounding in metaphysical truth, an approach shared by spiritual traditions that see the human being as more than just mind and body.
This book is an unapologetic call to re-sacralize psychology and reclaim its spiritual roots. Sotillos offers a remedy to the soul-deep alienation afflicting modern individuals: an embrace of the transcendent, the sacred, and the timeless truths that point to the eternal nature of consciousness and the longer story of the human soul.
Sotillos doesn’t merely critique the status quo; he offers an integrative vision of healing that honors the fullness of what it means to be human, backed by a deft weaving of research and storytelling from the world's wisdom traditions. Sotillos offers examples of the power of psychological healing when grounded in the tenets and methodologies of indigenous traditions as well as Abrahamic religions; in so doing, he establishes a wide tent for the spiritually curious. In these pages we find that being change agents in an unstable world first requires a deep return to our true nature—one connected to infinite consciousness and the divinity of the human soul.
"Samuel Bendeck Sotillos is the only psychotherapist that I know of that works from a universal and timeless ontological orientation." - Wolfgang Smith, physicist and mathematician, author of Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology
“Finally a book from a psychotherapist willing to explore the indispensable link between mental health and spirituality. Bendeck Sotillos reminds us that the essence of our well-being depends, ultimately, on being grounded in holiness, or at least in our best personal effort to cultivate spiritual virtues. Modern psychology, in its complicated quest for sanity, has tried to reinvent the wheel, when all we need to do is restore the healing sap of the heavenly circle girding human life. The author offers profound insights about traditional ways in which we can be reconciled to the timeless essence of who we really are, without which no lasting cure is possible. In doing so, he exposes the nature of modern man’s alienation from his immortal being—the root cause of all our anxiety, depression, and neuroses. To delve into this enlightening book is to rediscover the providential thread of Ariadne that leads us out of the labyrinth of ego estrangement towards the immortal source of human joy.” - Mark Perry, professional translator, author of The Mystery of Individuality: Grandeur and Delusion of the Human Condition

Samuel Bendeck Sotillos