Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Symington’s contribution includes his creative ideas and his person as an icon of non-
conformist psychoanalytic spirituality. Firstly, Symington comprehensively rejects
orthodox religious beliefs that posit an external God or deity made known through
revelation. Like the autobiographical priest (Symington 2004b) Symington needs to leave
the Roman Catholic Church (representative of all religions) in order to find an emotional
life. Secondly, he locates the religious dimension as a desire for meaning that is discovered
within, through ancient wisdom enshrined in all religions, most often discovered by the
mystics. Thirdly, there is an emotional wisdom to be experienced through the agency of a
relational other, which analysts are best equipped to engage with.
It is evident from the questions and debate that Symington’s meditations provoked that he
has enabled the voice of analysts and psychotherapists to speak on issues of religion that had
rarely been heard. Symington’s authenticity arises from: a personal history as part of a
religious tradition; his rigorous theological training with an emphasis on philosophical
theology; his ongoing interest in the philosophical issues, religious and psychoanalytic; and
an engagement with emotional experience that crosses boundaries corresponding with the
mystical and the analytic, especially in Bion.
Symington plays a representative or priestly role in upholding the vital importance of the
religious, spiritual, and mystical dimensions of personhood within psychoanalysis. He
offers a paradoxical approach which locates mature religion in the theological developments
of the 1960s, post-Vatican II reforms and the ‘death of God’ theology (Symington 2004b)
allied to the postmodern re-discovery of the self in relation to other/Other through the
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