Introduction

Summary

In early March 1983, the United Kingdom's Prince Charles, and his then wife, Princess Diana, visited the Edinburgh home of Winifred Rushforth (1885–1983), a 97-year-old psychotherapist, New Age guru, and retired medical doctor (Rushforth 1984: 174). Prince Charles – or the ‘Duke of Rothesay’ as he is officially known while in Scotland – was prompted to visit Rushforth after receiving copies of her 1981 book, Something is Happening (Rushforth 1983, Rushforth 1984: 174), a collection of essays, as its subtitle announced, on Spiritual Awareness and Depth Psychology in the New Age. Notes made during the Prince's visit, and preserved in Rushforth's papers, indicate that he and Rushforth discussed a number of topics in their hourlong meeting, including: their shared admiration for the Jungian primitivist guru Sir Laurens van der Post (later exposed as an unsavoury criminal charlatan (Jones 2001)); the Prince's enjoyment of Something is Happening; his interest in holistic forms of healthcare; and his difficulties in meditating (Summary of conversation). Charles and Rushforth also corresponded after their meeting (Rushforth 1984: 174), although this was cut short by the latter's death a few months later, in August 1983 (Rushforth 1984: 176).

The encounter between Charles and Rushforth testifies to the latter's local prominence in the mingling of religion and psychotherapy. As later chapters in this monograph will show in detail, Rushforth exemplifies a Scottish interweaving of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, a seemingly clinical activity, with both Christianity and an emergent post-war New Age spirituality. Rushforth and the Davidson Clinic – the psychotherapeutic clinic which she founded, and which ran in Edinburgh from 1941 to 1973 – renewed the discourses of Christianity using the idioms and practices of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. In 1942, the Clinic's Annual Report declared unabashedly that ‘psycho-therapeutic treatment can bring about miracles of healing which are the fulfilment of the Divine purpose’ (Annual Report 1942: 2). Even as the medical prestige of psychoanalytic psychotherapy waned in the post-war years, Rushforth, as Edinburgh's resident matriarch and guru of the New Age, continued to promote a psychotherapeutically informed spirituality which was clearly attractive to those seeking spiritual enlightenment – including the future monarch.