While scientific interest in the relationship between psychotherapeutic praxis and spirituality is growing, there is still little knowledge on this topic, especially in an East Central European context. To explore how psychotherapists understand spiritual issues and experiences they encounter in their work and to learn what happens to these issues in the course of psychotherapy, this study analyses semi-structured interviews with 30 Hungarian psychotherapists. Applying a grounded theory analytical strategy, three main topics were identified: the therapist's attitude towards spirituality leaves a discernible trace in the psychoterapeutic treatment; the therapist influences the way spiritual issues are treated; and the therapist may have a shared spiritual experience with the client. We present individual variations of these experiences as they appear in the code tree. Results are interpreted with reference to a systemic view of the psychotherapeutic process, the intersubjective space of patient and therapist, and the notion of the therapists’ mentalizational capacity.

There has been a constantly growing interest towards the themes of psychotherapy and spirituality in the past decades. The questions and experiences concerning spirituality can come up and play an important role in the psychotherapeutic relationship. Often another helping relationship, spiritual direction or pastoral counseling is already present in religious people's life, before or at the time of starting psychotherapy. In our research we tried to find answers to the question of how psychotherapists approach cooperation with spiritual directors and pastoral counselors, what attitudes and experiences they have in this regard. In the research semi-structured in-depth interviews were carried out with 31 Hungarian psychotherapists, and they were analyzed with the method of Grounded Theory. Four main categories evolved during the analysis of the interviews. In the first main category, where there is no cooperation between the helping professionals, codes refer to the attitudes, whether the psychotherapists would be open to cooperate, what professional considerations they would follow, and in what framework the cooperation could be realized. In the second main category the psychotherapist and the spiritual director work parallel with the patient, without contacting each-other, in the third the psychotherapist is in contact with the spiritual director / pastoral counselor, and in the fourth the psychotherapist evaluates the experiences of the cooperation.