C. Michael Smith (born August 29, 1950, in Indianapolis, Indiana) is a clinical psychologist and scholar whose medical anthropological and theoretical work has focused on the study of healing systems across cultures.

His special area of focus has been in bridging indigenous medical systems with depth psychology.In 2018 he gave the Keynote Lectures in Clinical and Humanistc Psychology at Saybrook University.

Smith's work has been an interdisciplinary enterprise in applying the phenomenological-hermeneutic and dialogic method of inquiry, learned while a student of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur at the University of Chicago.

This methodology was then combined with medical-anthropological methods of analysis and interpretation of healing systems across cultures, derived from his studies with Sudhir Kakar, also at Chicago.

Finally he combined all this with the scheme of "ritual process and leadership in establishing and maintaining the boundaries of transformative sacred space" created by his doctoral chair, the Jungian analyst and theorist Robert L. Moore, of the Chicago Theological Seminary.

Smith has defined medical-anthropology thus: Medical anthropology is a multi-disciplinary field examining the relationship between culture and health care systems, and the way disease is engendered, shaped, managed, diagnosed, and treated within a given society.

Smith also criticized the field of transpersonal psychology for an over-emphasis on Eastern mysticisms and practices [Psych & Sacred 12-13], claiming that more attention needed to be given to western religious traditions, to the indigenous American and shamanic peoples of the circumpolar regions, and of the Americas, North, Central, and South.

He focuses particularly on Jung's concept of the archetypal Self, and its Spiritus Rector function as the most likely model of how the sacred can be present and effective in the psyche, and support clinical healing efforts.