Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

These all reflect the creativity to be found in bringing Jewish religious beliefs and practices
together with those forms of psychoanalysis open to dialogue (Aron and Henik 2009). In
turn psychoanalysis has its own unique insights to offer on Jewish religion (Frosh 2005),
though like approaches taken to Christian religion, often reductively (Arlow 1982/1997).
Adopting a critical social perspective Frosh identifies the shared concerns of psychoanalysis
and Judaism as: ‘depth interpretation … seeing ‘beyond’ or ‘beneath’ … and … the
bounding of desire by law’ (Frosh 2006: 206).
Spero’s work adopted object relations theory, rather than Freud, as a source of insight into
the divine, focused on God as Creator and experienced in moral imperatives evoked by
Jewish laws. While highly creative, Spero’s work has had little impact on the wider
psychoanalytic world beyond Israel and the challenge he posited of an objective God
discovered through psychoanalysis still waits to be fully addressed. 271 However this is the
subject of a forthcoming doctoral thesis on ‘The encounter between psychoanalysis and
Judaism in written texts and within the identity of religious therapists’ (Novis-Deutsch
2010a, 2010b). 272 Building on object relations theories, amongst others, and working from
an intersubjective perspective Aron advocates parallels based on relationality. ‘The Jewish
tradition, as I understand it, is radically relational in its assumption of a mutual and
intersubjective relationship between God and humanity’ (Aron 2004: 445). This
intersubjective relationship between psychoanalysis, religion and spirituality is still being
worked out, but draws on Jewish foundations implicit in psychoanalysis itself and is a
271 There is only one reference to Spero in Black’s important text (Black 2006). Similar attempts from a
Christian perspective, such as Sorenson (Sorenson 2004) evoked a similar response and there is only one
reference in Black.
272 While the PhD thesis is in Hebrew the author has communicated an 8-page abstract of her work in English.
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