Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

ased on illusion. Whereas religion ‘dogmatizes and mythologizes’ this
loving/uniting/fusing process, psychoanalysis seeks to understand what lies behind this
process by going beyond religion. Yet Kristeva does not dismiss this Christian vision but
engages with Christianity, especially through its symbols. Kristeva discusses: the soul;
mysticism, especially Guyon, and an ongoing interest in Teresa of Avila (Midttun 2006); the
Bible both as a sacred and literary text; the doctrine of the Trinity; the Virgin Mary, the
Eucharist; and key theologians including Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Bernard of
Clairvaux, Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli (Kristeva 1987a, 1987b, 1995). Kristeva finds in
female mystics (with their embodiment and maternal vision) a transition beyond religion
that addresses the modern situation with its ‘psychological poverty … artificial soul’,
‘amputated subjectivity’ (Kristeva 1995: 7) and ‘abolition of psychic space’ (Kristeva
1987b: 373). This leads to a renewed interest in religion and more importantly for Kristeva
a renewed subject for psychoanalytic engagement. Psychoanalysis brings new life to the
psyche by uncovering new maladies of the soul unique to the human condition. Kristeva
uses the metaphor of fire to illustrate this. The Bible has a capacity to promote places of fire
– the burning bush and Moses, the experience of Isaiah in the Temple, the Pentecostal blaze
– and psychoanalysis also has the capacity to ‘set ablaze’. ‘The experience of
psychoanalysis results in a sort of combustion’ where meaning, emptiness and healing are
encountered in an indefinable fire of tongues as a form of transformation or epiphany
(Kristeva 1995: 134). The language of mysticism pervades Kristeva’s speech. 254
254 Bradley explores this further. ‘Christian mysticism represents a key moment in the historical transition
from the epoch of theology to that of psychoanalysis: Teresa of Avila … and other female mystics
progressively affirm the other within the subject as opposed to the divine other that supposedly lies outside it.
If Christianity seeks to transcendentalize immanent drives … Kristeva’s work relocates the transcendent firmly
within the body: mysticism … turned inside out’ (Bradley 2008: 280).
111