Book Review: Apollo's Lyre: The Art of Spiritual Psychotherapy

This is a scholarly and precise journey into a whole new realm of psychotherapy called spiritual psychotherapy. It is a book that will transform the reader and encourage her to keep learning. In short, it is a book that will make the reader pause and become nurtured by Dr. Porter’s words of wisdom.

Apollo is a wonderful Greek god of spiritual healing who gives the reader the power to see deeply into their own souls and to allow that power to deeply impact us and renew us from the inside-out. This is something that we all need, especially in these cultural times when we are beckoned to live an external, ordinary life without a sense of our souls and the fact that our real life starts there.

As a philosopher, I find Dr. Porter’s spiritual psychotherapy fascinating, encouraging and transforming. Dr. Porter’s theory has nothing to do with whether we are religious or believe in God or go to church. Instead, it is about the potential that we all have inside of ourselves to embody in our lives those qualities of love, wisdom, joy, power, will and creativity that the ancients ascribed to the gods, that is our birthright.

The central tenets of Dr. Porter’s spiritual psychotherapy are that all human beings have an ordinary self and a healthy spiritual core, which is the Real Self and is largely neglected in today’s culture. He further asserts that genuine healing involves our connecting to this core Real Self.

We can facilitate our discovery of our Real Self by dis-identifying from our ordinary self. We can do this by mentally stepping back and observing our ordinary self and exploring who we truly are. Each of us has a Real Self which is universal and discoverable by turning inward. Psychotherapy can help an individual discover their real self. Dr. Porter has facilitated many of these discoveries in his forty-eight years as a psychotherapist. It can help the patient become aware of a part of himself that is deeper and more meaningful and doesn’t depend on things that are outside of him.

I loved this book! It is one of these books that I will be reading and re-reading for a long time. It is a book that is written for all individuals who are trying to discover their Real Self because they are tired of living their current life. It is also written for psychotherapists who want a new spiritual way of helping their patients discover their Real Selves.

I can’t wait to read your next book! This is one of the most transforming books I’ve read in a very long time.

Reviewed by Irene S. Roth