Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

experiential moments of timelessness, unity, sudden moments of compassion and intuition,
and hearing the still small voice of God. Fourthly, through a religious conversion
experience. These experiences lead to a disclosure of the imago dei in a person experienced
as love, where psychoanalysis and divine self-disclosure cohere. The role of religion and
psychoanalysis is to question. ‘If psychoanalysis had theological pretensions, one of them
might well be the claim that questioning authority is a God-given function of the human
soul’ (Leavy 1990: 105). This questioning leads to new disclosure,
the most essential hypothesis of psychoanalysis is that we lead a life that is largely
hidden from ourselves ... the daily experience in psychoanalysis, where the acute
listening of both doctor and patient is designed to permit unexpressed feelings,
unformulated ideas, disregarded or lost memories, unaccepted or abandoned desires,
to be spoken to speak themselves ... is both liberating and invigorating, and therefore
creating. When we become conscious of the previously hidden ways of our minds,
something new comes into being. In other words, unconcealment is also creation.
Just as God's work of creation and redemption is an unconcealment. Analysing,
both as doctor and patient, is acting in the image of God (Leavy 1988: 106f.).
Leavy’s work represents a Protestant contribution to the engagement of psychoanalysis and
religion 233 affirming transcendent reality (Rizzuto 1990; Jones 1991; Meissner 1991).
Meissner compares Leavy with Pfister where Leavy ‘finds no contradiction between
analysis and faith, and in fact sees them as congruent paths leading in the direction of the
divine’ (Meissner 1991: 290). Leavy’s work has been criticized for its Christian focus that
equates religious belief with a personal God (Symington 1994) and an exclusion of Judaism
(Spero 1992). 234 Leavy offers incarnational forms of psychoanalytic and religious
engagement through: a unifying view of human nature; the struggle for and importance of
love; engagement with suffering; and the offer of hope. Allied to this is a shared analytic
233 Previous contributions were made by Tillich (Jones 1991; Sorenson 2004) and Pruyser (Sorenson 2004).
234 While Spero’s critique also applies to Meissner and Rizzuto, Leavy does use Jewish texts and
interpretations but locates itself within a specifically Christian tradition and does not attempt to claim
superiority for this. He does claim that it is his own tradition that he speaks about with his own authority.
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