0.14 Religious perspectives on personality  (Page 4/14)

Kabbalah seems to compare most favorably with a cognitive approach to understanding personality and healing broken relationships. Kabbalah describes a complex arrangement of elements that underlie our relationship with God, the universe, and consequently, ourselves and other people. Understanding these relationships is the key to balancing our emotions, thoughts, and styles of relating to others. Unhappiness is viewed as the result of a serious imbalance in our understanding of the true nature of our place in our community, society, and life itself. While many different forms of psychotherapy help people to develop insight into their personality and relationships, Kabbalah proposes to go beyond insight. Once again, for those people who live life with a deep spiritual faith, ignoring one's faith makes it all but impossible to find balance in one’s life. Only a spiritual path, perhaps augmented by a traditional psychotherapeutic emphasis on everyday problems and stressors, can help to balance the entire life of the spiritual person. Thus, Kabbalah need not be viewed as an alternative to psychotherapy, but rather as a bridge between psychology and spirituality (Weiss, 2005).

There is, however, a problem facing most psychologists when it comes to the study of Kabbalah. Being based on spirituality and the unquestioned belief in Yahweh, Kabbalists are willing to examine questions that are decidedly unscientific, such as Jung’s concept of synchronicity. They also study the higher dimensions of human existence, such as awakening ecstasy (Hoffman, 2007). In this regard their goals are similar to those of Maslow, and his desire to understand self-actualization and its relationship to spiritual experiences, and to the whole field of positive psychology, and its emphasis on doing more for people than simply addressing the adjustment disorders and/or mental illness of those suffering psychological distress. Yet Kabbalah goes even further into the realm of parapsychology, fully believing in reincarnation (Besserman, 1997; Hoffman, 2007; Laitman, 2005; Weiss, 2005). In 1988, psychiatrist Brian Weiss, Chairman Emeritus of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami, published Many Lives, Many Masters . In this book, he described a case in which he was able to help a young woman through the use of past-life therapy . Since the Kabbalistic view of reincarnation suggests an explanation for Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious (see also, Halevi, 1986), the use of past-life therapy may not be as strange as many would insist it must be. In continuing to study this phenomenon, Dr. Weiss does not suggest simply accepting anyone’s word that reincarnation is real or that past-life therapy will help:

It is vital to carry your logical, rational mind on this journey. To accept everything without reflection, contemplation, and thoughtfulness would be just as foolish as rejecting everything in the same manner. Science is the art of observing carefully with an unbiased, non-prejudicial eye. (pg. 7; Weiss, 2000)