Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Leavy’s theological ideas begin with a developmental reflection on the Imago Dei
understood theologically, philosophically and analytically with chapters on:
psychoanalyzing; becoming; loving and hating; concealing; suffering; believing; ending;
and reflecting (Leavy 1988: x). ‘Human nature leads towards and not away from faith in
God’ (Leavy 1988: xi) as people become like God in true humanity by ‘transcending
ourselves and extending our consciousness beyond’ (Leavy 1988: xi). The purpose of
humanity is to look for meaning, to be creative, and to express love where ‘these actions
correspond with the picture of God that has been revealed to us’ (Leavy 1988: xii) expressed
in the worship of God and although ‘the imago dei may never be realizable as such, but as a
symbol of the implicit human life-project, it holds out hope’ (Leavy 1988: x). The
psychoanalyst’s role is to help a person discover what the image of God is like, an early
object representation as in Rizzuto 232 , but unlike Meissner and Rizzuto, Leavy relates this to
transcendent reality. Underpinning all his work, Leavy argues that the religious and analytic
task require that ‘to accomplish our desires, we need to love and be loved’ (Leavy 1988:
20). Leavy offers four ways in which the imago dei is experienced. Firstly, by accepting the
concept of revelation as understood in religious tradition and transmitted through memory
held by religious communities. Secondly, by recognizing that psychoanalytic insight and
faith insight are complementary and can enhance each other. Thirdly, through mystical
experience that goes beyond the ability of language to fully describe, replete with
is, in his passion and sacrificial death, the exemplification of complete internalization and sublimation of all
earthly relationships and needs’ (Loewald quoted in Leavy 1990: 56). Leavy also includes other theistic
religions, Judaism and Islam.
232 ‘Just as it is obligatory for the analyst, who is a believer in a religion to be open to the reality maintained by
other kinds of believers, and nonbelievers, and always to be able to distinguish what I have called the waking
reality of belief from the dream world, so the agnostic analyst needs to do the same in his or her own way,
leaving open the possibility that the transcendent otherness that religious persons claim to approach is as real
as they claim it to be, as real as chairs and tables and families, as well a science and arts. Which comes down
to recognizing once again that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy’
(Leavy 1990: 58).
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