Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

efines psychoanalytic insights. 240 Spero states there is an objective God that all human
persons engage with, and this is included in the transference relationship that arises out of
the object world of each person. Spero’s model incorporates human objects, objective God
objects, and projected god objects, all located in an external world. This corresponds to
object, endopsychic and god representations in an internal world, with transitional object
representations hovering between the two. While drawing on Pruyser, Oden, Fowler, Jung,
Meissner, Rizzuto, McDargh, Leavy and Winnicott, Spero critiques their limited ability to
represent the whole object constellation. Spero sees human personhood developing in
relationship to one another – anthropocentric, in parallel with human personhood
developing in relationship with God – deocentric. Following Bion, Spero sees one as
containing the other and allows the presence of objects, including the religious, to be given
life (Spero 1992: 177f.). Spero concludes his work by re-visiting Freud and finding in his
early work reference to communication that allows connection to something other, that
precedes infantile belief as part of psychical development. Black values the profound
questions Spero raises, without being convinced of his argument (Black 1993), yet Spero
remains one of the first psychoanalytic practitioners to hold to the objective truth of God,
while creatively engaging with psychoanalysis. 241
240 ‘Halakhah is the Jewish law, not only the Torah … It is a deep-rooted Jewish belief that in following the
halakhah human beings come to resemble God, for in its inmost reality halakhah represents the law by which
God acted when he created the universe … The ontological underpinning of psychoanalysis is the ontological
structure affirmed by the halakhah’ (Black 1993: 1086).
241 Cohen offers a perceptive analysis of Spero’s work. ‘His assertion that the reality of God must be
acknowledged in clinical psychoanalytic work with religious patients has led to a critique of Lacanian thinking
and the formation of a psychoanalytic epistemology in which divinity, in whose image humanity is created,
becomes the “ground” for representation and interpersonal communication’ (Cohen 2008: 13).
105