Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

process which Buddhism acknowledges; less acknowledged are the negative aspects where
psychopathology hides beneath a religious veneer as a psychological defence (Ross
2003). 294 One service psychoanalysis can do for all religions is to enable this to be
acknowledged and dealt with (Ross 2006). 295 A balance can be found as just as a person is
part of ‘a matrix of human relationships. This is rightly the province of psychoanalysis’
(Black 1993a: 623) they are also part of an evolving cosmos so ‘to fully get one’s bearings
in life the larger picture also needs to be entertained’ (Black 1993a: 623). For Black this is
through engagement with science but not simply at an intellectual level. Each person needs
to sense the presence that flows though him of,
the atoms in his body built in the depths of long-exploded stars … Religion, which
turns the universe from It to Thou (in Buber’s profound and simple phrase), may
therefore be truth-telling in a way that science cannot … an attempt is being made to
conceptualize the unconceptualizeable, and therefore the concepts of religion can
never “fit” exactly. But they do a job nothing else does’ (Black 1993a: 623).
Black constructs his own trikaya which serves as a model for his later thinking where
knowing comes through the three-fold engagement of psychoanalysis, science and religion.
Rather than Buddhist meditation, Black offers a reflective/contemplative space that is more
accessible than the mystical oceanic feeling that both attracted and repelled Freud in
Rolland’s thinking. Freud recognized that Rolland could speak of something ‘other’ that
Freud knew was there, but could not speak of. Black maintains the difficult balance of
giving due recognition to both psychoanalysis and religion, despite aspirations from both
sides to be the ‘dominating vertex, through offering a new understanding of transcendence’
(Black 2006: 63). Drawing on the philosophy of language, contemporary psychoanalysis
and neuroscience Black suggests that human beings experience different kinds of
294 This issue was raised in an interview with Joe Bobrow included in the thematic analysis.
295 Schulman offers insightful clinical vignettes of her work with fundamentalist religious patients (Schulman
2004). All systems of belief, including psychoanalysis, can be used defensively and pathologically.
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