Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

approach to psychoanalysis has meant the analytic world, with a few exceptions (Sayers
2003) has failed to sufficiently benefit from her unique advocacy of the religious and the
mystical as normative, meaning-bearing, imaginative, and creative. 256
Spero, Symington and Kristeva share a vision that psychoanalysis, as a system, is
incomplete. For Spero the central task is a re-discovery of the truths of human personhood
founded upon the created and creative acts of God into which psychoanalysis is invited as a
co-operative partner. Symington views psychoanalysis as a system that can evolve to
possess moral authority based on soul-searching truthfulness, whilst aware of the human
capacity to deceive itself. Kristeva offers a breadth and depth of approach, which goes
beyond the limited confines of psychoanalysis, in a holistic vision that includes religious
and mystical dimensions.
Psychoanalysis connects persons socially, through common values of love and hope, and
spiritually to something that is other/Other, though never fully defined. Spero, Symington
and Kristeva can be viewed in Buber’s terms as searching after an I-Thou encounter,
making space for the sacred within and without the psyche, where traditional psychoanalytic
language and insight fails. This idea is returned to in the concluding chapter of the thesis.
256 Kristeva is also aware that there can still be religious pathology in her patients.
113