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

Dan Merkur is a psychoanalyst in private practice and a research reader in the study of religion at the University of Toronto