Crucified with Christ: Meditation on the Passion, Mystical Death, and the Medieval Invention of Psychotherapy

Delineates how medieval meditation on the passion of Christ was intended to transform personality―a practice with affinity for the goals of modern psychotherapy.

Crucified with Christ offers a fascinating study of the psychoanalytic character of medieval meditation. Most meditation practitioners imagined themselves in the place of an eyewitness to the passion; however, some, including Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis of Assisi, and Bonaventure, introduced meditation from the perspective of Jesus. They felt the imagined crucifixion, passion, and death as experiences of their own and understood them in Pauline terms as “crucifixions with Christ.” As knowledge of mystical death experiences accumulated over the centuries, it was noted that repeated mystical unions with Christ in his death could create personality change, imparting the sweetness of Jesus’ personality to the meditators.

Author Dan Merkur illustrates that in both its details and its goal, the meditative process meets contemporary psychoanalytic criteria for psychotherapeutic change. The medieval practice of meditation, Merkur writes, is comprehensible as guided imagery therapy that takes the meditator from fear of death to forgiveness of persecutors―in psychoanalytic terms, dissolving resistance through a capacity for concern and relationality.