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Religious Dimension

You don't need faith to access the sacred: it's enough to let yourself be touched by mystery
Throughout history, every culture has developed symbolic forms to express the questions that have always accompanied human beings: the meaning of existence, suffering, death, transcendence, and our place in the world. Religious traditions represent some of the deepest expressions of that search, offering, over centuries, frameworks of meaning, practices, and communities that accompany the unfolding of human life.
Hildegard of Bingen, cosmological vision, Liber Divinorum Operum, 13th-century copy

From the standpoint of Analytical Psychology, Carl Gustav Jung proposed understanding this dimension through the concept of the religious function. By this he didn't mean adherence to any particular religion, but rather a disposition built into the human psyche itself—an orientation toward whatever is experienced as transcendent, meaningful, or numinous.

This view doesn't attempt to reduce religion to a psychological phenomenon, nor does it replace the spiritual value of religious traditions. On the contrary, it recognizes that psychology and religion approach the same experience from different levels of analysis.

Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, diagram of the Sefirot, Kabbala Denudata, 1677-1684

While religions concern themselves with humanity's relationship to ultimate reality or to mystery, psychology is interested in how that experience manifests, takes symbolic form, and plays a part in a person's process of transformation.

Al-Sayyid Lutfi, Molla Kasım and Ustad Osman (Ottoman imperial workshop), celestial map, Zubdat al-Tawarikh by Seyyid Lokman, 1583. Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, Istanbul (TIEM 1973)

My interest in this field began with the study of Analytical Psychology and deepened during my Master's in Religious Diversity in a Globalized World (ReD Global), where I had the opportunity to study the three Abrahamic religions comparatively, along with their differing ways of understanding human development. That training reinforced my conviction that religious and spiritual experience form a fundamental dimension of existence, and that engaging with it calls for respectful dialogue between psychology, philosophy, the history of religions, and the spiritual traditions themselves.

In my clinical practice, this approach means offering a space where questions of meaning, calling, symbols, spiritual experience, or existential crisis can be heard without reducing them to a purely psychological explanation—while still not giving up a rigorous reading of the psychic processes that accompany them.

Dr. Julieta Loza

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