(5 / 5)
Demonic possession or mental illness? How to tell them apart? What about both existent at the same time? These and many more questions are expertly answered in a book that explores the topic of possession in great detail from psychological and spiritual viewpoints – In Bondage to Evil: A Psycho-Spiritual Understanding of Possession (Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2018) by T. Craig Isaacs.
Isaacs holds the perfect qualifications and experience to educate readers on the topic of possession and mental illness. As a professional psychotherapist as well as a priest dealing in spiritual formation, he brings the ideal set of knowledge and experience to explore the often debatable phenomenon of spirit possession. He doesn’t disappoint his readers when it comes to explaining issues in mental illness and spirit possession. In various chapters, Isaacs compares and contrasts the phenomenon of spirit possession – not all of which is necessarily involuntary or demonic – with recognized mental illnesses that are very similar, for instance, the multiple personality disorder and schizophrenia etc.
There is a lot of information in Isaacs’ In Bondage to Evil. It is an attention-demanding book loaded with historical, cultural and religious traditions as they relate spirits and possessing, and scientific facts mainly from the field of abnormal psychology and psychotherapy. Readers are offered exact details of diagnoses in various categories of mental illness that overlap with the possession phenomenon. Isaacs proceeds deductively, much as a philosopher, to build a case for recognizing a new diagnostic category in the psychology of mental illness – the possessive states disorder.
In Bondage to Evil is a work for the general audience and is very reader-friendly in style despite having a significant portion of several of its chapters leaning on the side of academic discourse. While the subject matter deals with spirits and the unseen world that can affect us, it is essentially a work of psychology, and more particularly of the Analytical Psychology founded by Carl Jung. The book thus offers extra appeal to readers interested in Jungian psychology. But it really is a great read for anyone interested in spirits/spiritualism, possession, and mental health.
Format: eBook
ISBN: 9781532631429
Availability: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/in-bondage-to-evil-t-craig-isaacs/1127944329