Abstract
This noteworthy book is essential for all interested in the relationship between spirituality and psychology. While it is directed toward clinicians, and especially psychiatrists, the book’s accessibility invites a sizeable general readership, as well. Anglican priest and psychiatrist Christopher Cook’s singular focus is on auditory verbal hallucinations. He cites research that “has shown that they are commonly experienced in the general population in the absence of any diagnosable condition” (p. 17). Using Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, and Joan of Arc as examples of medieval women for whom hearing spiritual voices was central to their experience, Cook shows that “modern psychiatric commentary on the voices that these women reported has generally focused on diagnosis rather than on wider questions of meaning” (p. 2). Diagnosis has thus become a means of scientific reductionism, whereby “a whole range of saints and mystics, not to mention ordinary religious people and patients in current-day psychiatric clinics, are hermeneutically disenfranchised” (p. 36). Cook challenges modern psychiatry to “find a more spiritually empathetic, if not also sympathetic, enriching and meaning-enhancing perspective on unusual mental phenomena” (p. 2).
Cook’s approach in the book exemplifies his commitment to the medical humanities. He expertly presents his medieval subjects through the lenses of historian, theologian, and clinician, showing that while each woman might be “diagnosable” from the perspective of contemporary psychiatry, their importance as spiritual geniuses is in no way diminished. Julian, for example, might best be understood diagnostically to have suffered from delirium, but that her spiritual experiences “initially arose during the course of an illness does not in any way undermine their significance” (p. 61). Julian’s illness is only one aspect of the larger fabric of her life, which produced, in the Revelations, a text of lasting theological and spiritual significance. “Whatever the initial provocation and context,” the Revelations “provided food for thought for Julian over two decades and have been found valuable by others over a period of more than six centuries, and this in itself must suggest that they are not delirious ‘ravings’ of any ordinary kind” (p. 61). Left to its own devices, though, the biological focus of modern psychiatry is unable to value a figure like Julian properly, or, Cook holds, of modern patients whose spiritual experiences are “hermeneutically disenfranchised” by the reductionism of psychiatric diagnosis.
Cook calls for something broader and bolder than the popular notion of integrating spirituality and psychology. He wants to push the world of mental health practice toward “a much more ambiguous and risky mental space” (p. 120) that goes “beyond traditional notions of interdisciplinary engagement” (p. 119). He questions the helpfulness of traditional disciplinary boundaries, instead calling for the “’entanglement’ of the humanities with the medical sciences” (p. 119). This would result in a more meaningful psychiatry “deeply entangled with the wider human quest for meaning” (p. 120). Such psychiatry would have no place for “differential diagnosis between ‘genuine’ spiritual experience and mental disorder” (p. 121). Instead, psychiatry would be “concerned both to make medical diagnoses (where appropriate) and affirm the universal human search for meaning” (p. 121).
Hearing Spiritual Voices is a challenging and refreshing indictment of contemporary mental health practice and affirms spiritual experience as a phenomenon with integrity and profound value. Most spiritual caregivers have had experiences of congregants or patients in whom the presence of “unusual mental phenomena” (p. 36) opened unique insights and perspectives into what God was doing in their lives and even into the nature of God. This book does more than permit the caregiver to embrace the importance and validity of these experiences. It upends the scientific reductionism that prevails in contemporary culture and psychiatry and allows for the reality that spiritual genius did not end with figures like Margery, Julian, and Joan. For Cook, spirituality need not pass the litmus test of psychiatric diagnosis; instead, psychiatry must answer for its deficiencies and risk engaging with deep human phenomena that defy easy categorization.
