Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

very centre of Christian teaching’ and ‘is not explicitly mentioned in the early credal
formulae’ (Symington 1991: 465). Symington also believed ‘many analysts are not very
competent at analyzing religious people. Some analysts leave the patient’s religion entirely
out of the analysis, as in the case of someone I met who had been in analysis for over seven
years yet whose devout Catholic upbringing was never mentioned’ (Symington 1991:
464f.). He rectified this by developing a synthesis of psychoanalysis and religion in
Emotion and Spirit (Symington 1994, 1998) and his later work with his wife Joan
Symington on Bion, including his view of O (Symington and Symington 1996). Symington
rejects primitive religion based on revelation and a transcendent Other/God and redefines
religion as the desire for a morality of freedom and responsibility.
The analytic encounter, while drawing on wisdom potentially found in all religions enables
‘the transformation of narcissism into concern for others’ (Blass 2006: 27). Psychoanalysis
becomes ‘the pinnacle of mature religiosity and a much-needed substitute for the failed
primitive religions’ (Blass 2006: 27). It was in his later work The Spirit of Sanity
(Symington 2001) that he develops most fully his distinctive vision of psychoanalysis as a
natural religion, 248 a text neglected by the psychoanalytic community as a whole. 249
248 Symington first used this term in his contribution to an edited work in 1993 (Ward 1993), much more fully
in Emotion and Spirit (Symington 1994), again in another edited work in 1999 (Stein 1999), as well as in his
later work (Symington 2004a, 2007).
249 It could be argued that this text is less accessible because it requires a working knowledge of Symington’s
previous work and he sees no need to repeat himself. No reviews of this text have been published in the major
psychoanalytic journals as found in PEP 1.7, although it was reviewed in the British Journal of Psychotherapy.
This book was based on a series of talks Symington gave at a conference held under the auspices of the
Tavistock Clinic, London – long regarded as the centre of excellence for psychoanalytic work in a public
health-care setting and constituted as an NHS health care trust. It is not a psychoanalytic institute and the
audience consisted of a wider range of health professionals, including psychologists and psychotherapists, than
would normally be found in an analytic institute, whose scientific meetings are not open to the public.
Symington had long been employed and linked with the Tavistock Clinic before his move to Australia.
Despite Symington’s expertise in the area of religion he only addressed this in lecture form with the British
Psycho-Analytic Society on two occasions.
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