Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

examined psychoanalysis and religion through his understanding of the image of God
(Leavy 1988: xii), 228 building on The Psychoanalytic Dialogue (Leavy 1980) where he
adopts narrative and hermeneutic approaches. Drawing on linguists, philosophers and
analysts (de Saussure, Heidegger, Buber and Ricoeur, Schafer and Lacan), Leavy argues
that psychoanalysis is a dialogue between two people connected via language forms
allowing a revelation of hidden aspects of the other. 229 ‘The analytic process is a dyadic
exchange, a mutual fructification of one unconscious to another. The patient speaks to an
“other,” not in the sense of the “object” of Freudian psychoanalysis but in the spirit of the
“thou” of Martin Buber’ (Rangell 1982: 128). Psychoanalytic hermeneutics reveal ‘the
ambiguities of speech that the psychoanalytic situation evokes’ (Leavy 2005a: 156) taking
the form of transference. When applied to religious language, the same dialectical process
takes place, so clients being analyzed do not lose faith or gain faith, rather they learn to ask
questions of that faith that fits with their earliest history. 230 However Leavy also maintained
psychoanalyst from the late 1940s, graduating from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1953. Leavy is
described as ‘deeply religious, having converted from Judaism to Christianity in early adulthood’ (Leavy
2005b). Leavy and his wife were originally Quakers but later became part of the Anglo Catholic tradition in
the Episcopal Church.
228 Described by Meissner as ‘refreshing and thought-provoking’ (Meissner 1991: 288), ‘eloquent and
profoundly meaningful’ (Quoted in Leavy 1988: back-cover).
229 ‘The two parties to the psychoanalytic dialogue are not impersonal prospectors for some elusive ore hidden
in the unconscious mines of the patient, they are two people talking to each other, and their words will
“historicize” ... the unconscious, making the invisible transference visible through the facilitating agency of
language. For Leavy this dialogue is everything: two people making history with words, a new history that
corresponds … to the prehistoric, pre-verbal and early verbal past, but is not the past’ (Mahon 1987: 436).
230 ‘A religion that may be qualified with the term “existential” can speak to the analyzing person, confronts
him with the claim of God's existence, the announcement of God's concern for men and women, and of God's
mercy, love, and justice. It aims to excite faith and to promote practice. It insists on the relevance of God's
existence to human action. The response of the individual - as always - will depend on what I have called the
amplitude and the fit of the religious claim, with regard to this individual life, its history, its bondage and its
freedom (Leavy 2005a: 160). ‘The God-claims of religion … must be offered to our psychoanalytically
orientated world ... but the response of psychoanalytic man, his or her ability to say “yes, I believe” will have a
particular importance to Biblical religion, because it will be another step in the liberation of faith from its
constraints. Faith can never be absolute, because it cannot be delivered without the mediation of words - if we
except the actual experiences of the mystics … in the last analysis, so to speak, assent to the claims of faith is a
submission to authority. The claims are presented by the tradition of a community. They are not of our
making. Our assent need not be a sacrifice of the intellect … We recognize in the claims of faith an
authoritative interpretation of our life as we know it from within; it is this to which we give our assent. The
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