He called it spiritual bypassing, and the term has had remarkable staying power. I would call this psychological bypassing: the use of clinical or therapeutic language to avoid the numinous, in the same way spiritual bypassing uses transcendent language to avoid the psychological. The evasion is legible, particularly when the person refuses any psychological or emotional lens on their own life. Psychological bypassing, by contrast, looks like rigour. In a second piece, I take up what psychological bypassing costs, and what it asks of clinicians in practice.