Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Theoretically Hindu ideas have influenced several key psychoanalysts. There is a more
unconscious influence of Hinduism in the life of Bion. Bion has played a vital role in the
development of psychoanalysis, primarily through his ideas, though he brought into being a
distinctive group in Los Angeles whose most notable and influential analyst is Grotstein
(Grotstein 2007). Bion spent the first eight years of his life in India, which had a vital
influence on him, and he refers in his writing to the Bhagavad Gita (Bion 1967; Anderson
1997). Bion developed complex philosophical ideas about unknowable ultimate reality,
which he described through the symbol O. ‘The Hindu upanishadic notion of maya, a world
that is illusory but not exactly unreal, perhaps resonates with the relativized world of truth
that Bion’s O leaves us inhabiting’ (Black 2006: 11). Grotstein takes Bion’s work and
applies it to his own wide-ranging psychoanalytic, mystical, biblical, theological,
philosophical and neuroscientific thinking which includes references to the Bhagavad Gita,
particularly ‘In his sleep, Vishnu dreamed the dream of the Universe’ (Grotstein 1979,
1997c). Practically, an amalgamation of philosophical ideas impacted Emmanuel Ghent,
the founding figure in the development of the highly influential and creative relational track
of psychoanalytic training at New York University (NYU) that both Benjamin and Eigen are
a part of. Ghent in turn influenced Mark Epstein who went on, along with Rubin, to pioneer
the engagement of Buddhism with psychoanalysis (Epstein 2005, 2007). 311
311 Ghent, Epstein writes, ‘had been touched by India and could see the possibilities of integrating
psychoanalysis and Indian thought … In Indian mythology, the intermingling of the lower and higher, sensual
and spiritual, self and other, and erotic and enlightened … this perspective secretly permeates his work … it is
also the key to understanding Mannie’s interpretation of Winnicott, and his orientation to psychoanalysis …
We developed the idea that meditation, like psychoanalysis, is another way to evoke Winnicott’s transitional
space in the mind … Whereas Freud viewed our struggle as being with the unacceptable impulses, Mannie
inspired a more spiritual view of the struggle of the psyche, as a confrontation with the unintelligible aspects
of our sensual, emotional and spiritual lives’ (Epstein 2005: 130).
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