This review examines Samuel Bendeck Sotillos’s Psyche and the Sacred: Integrating Mental Health and Spiritual Well-Being (2025), a wide-ranging critique of the epistemological foundations of modern psychology and a sustained argument for recovering what the author calls a perennial “science of the soul.” Sotillos contends that contemporary psychology, shaped by Enlightenment secularism, scientism, and the dominance of biomedical and diagnostic paradigms, has severed itself from its original concern with the psyche as soul. The book draws extensively on the wisdom of Christian mysticism, Sufi metaphysics, Vedāntic philosophy, Buddhist psychology, and Indigenous cosmologies to demonstrate that the integration of mental health and spiritual well-being is not a novel innovation but a restoration of an older, cross-cultural anthropology.

The review highlights the book’s interdisciplinary and clinical relevance, especially its critique of the DSM/ICD frameworks, its reframing of the Enneagram and entheogenic practices within sacred traditions, and its challenge to the prevailing focus on symptom reduction at the expense of meaning and transcendence. It also notes limitations such as the book’s composite structure, thematic repetition, and lack of engagement with empirical outcome research in spiritually integrated psychotherapy. Nevertheless, Sotillos’s work is positioned as an important intervention in current debates on the decolonisation of psychology, the ethics of psychedelic therapies, and the need to recover metaphysical depth in therapeutic practice. The review argues that Psyche and the Sacred deserves the attention of clinicians, scholars of religion and psychology, and educators seeking to cultivate culturally and spiritually responsive approaches to mental-health care.