Case Example: Mild Mystical Experience Case
From Spiritual Competency Resource Center
© Dr. David Lukoff 1994, 2014


In the first case below, the mystical experience led to a mild form of spiritual emergency.

A woman in her early thirties sought out therapy to deal with unresolved parental struggles and guilt over a younger brother's psychosis. Approximately two years into her therapy, she underwent a typical mystical experience, including a state of ecstasy, a sense of union with the universe, a heightened awareness transcending space and time, and a greater sense of meaning and purpose to her life. For ten days, she remained in an ecstatic state. She felt that everything in her life had led up to this momentous experience and that all her knowledge had become reorganized during its course. Due to the rapid alteration in her mood and her unusual ideation, her therapist considered diagnoses of mania, schizophrenia, and hysteria. But he rejected these because many aspects of her functioning were either unchanged or improved, and overall her experience seemed to be

    more integrating than disintegrating. . .While a psychiatric diagnosis cannot be dismissed, her experience was certainly akin to those described by great religious mystics who have found a new life through them (p. 806).

This experience increasingly became the focus of her continued treatment, as she worked to integrate the insights and attitudinal changes that followed. The therapist reported that the most important gain from it was a conviction that she was a worthwhile person with worthwhile ideas, not the intrinsically evil person, 'rotten to the core', that her mother had convinced her she was. Her subsequent treatment focused on expanding the insights she had gained and on helping her to integrate the mystical experience.
(Adapted from Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, 1976).



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