“I had heard of the 18th century philosopher, Emanuel Swedenborg, and people had told me that some of his ideas were similar to IFS, but I had never studied him. So, it has been fascinating to read this dialogue between IFS therapist Bob Falconer and two of the world’s experts on Swedenborg. It also feels a bit surreal to have IFS compared so favorably to such an influential philosopher.

When we invite clients to focus on their parts, they often seem to enter a separate but real inner realm where they interact with one another, which is what I’ve studied the past forty years. Swedenborg seems to have spent much of his life exploring that realm and other, more spiritual ones. While some of his reports on those explorations are more challenging for me to translate than for the three authors, I delight in others that show how he was traversing the same territory as I have been, and clearly he encountered and has a lot to say about Self, but did it almost 300 years earlier. And, for those interested in the spiritual side of IFS, he points to worlds we have yet to explore.”

—Richard C. Schwartz, PhD, Founder of Internal Family Systems Therapy

“A fascinating conversation between three spiritual archaeologists—one an eminent scholar-practitioner of IFS, two who are erudite followers of Emanuel Swedenborg—on the architecture of the inner world, the cosmology of the spiritual world, and the process by which these two worlds are realigned through healing and authentic spiritual experience.”

—Frank Rogers Jr., Professor of Spiritual Formation & Narrative Pedagogy at Claremont School of Theology, Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Center for Engaged Compassion, Author of Cradled in the Arms of Compassion: A Spiritual Journey from Trauma to Recovery

“Read and understand Swedenborg through the lens of IFS and contemporary scholarship! This reading brought a Swedenborg that is accessible, relevant and fascinating. This is a book I will annotate and return to for additional insights.”

—Dr. Donald Davies, MD, Psychiatrist with more than thirty years of clinical experience 

Podcast appearances on Jeffrey Mishlove’s New Thinking Allowed, on The One Inside with Tammy Sollenberger, on That Wellness Podcast with Natalie Deering, on Off The Left Eye’s Swedenborg & Life with Curtis Childs, and many others.