Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

developed by Heidegger and used by Binswanger to describe being-in-the-world, a private
world of self-awareness and individual experience that had been neglected by classic
psychoanalysis (Lopez-Corvo 1999).
Thirdly, mysticism is viewed as a natural secular religion that involves the experiential freed
from the dogma of traditional religions (Hinshelwood 1999). Symington argues for a
mature or natural religion based on core religious ideas of meaning and value lived out
through the emotional life and relationships that embrace the psychic and the mystical, and
where psychoanalysis uniquely develops a spirituality of the world (Symington 1998). Thus
the ‘ideal religion becomes more of a personal, self-determined mysticism, devoid of
history, ritual, obligation, and mediation, a kind of westernized Buddhism’ (Blass 2006: 29).
Blass argues this understanding of religion fails to meet the lived experience of many
traditional believers and avoids the ultimate question of transcendent reality (Blass 2006:
33). 326 In essence psychoanalysis overwrites the religious dimension of mysticism, which
can now be encountered as mystical experiences as part of contemporary psychoanalysis.
Fourthly, mysticism and psychoanalysis offer different but complementary understandings
of human nature that enhance each other where Loewald is recognized for his ‘attunement
to the wisdom in each’ (Smith and Handelman 1990: x). Loewald reformulated Freud’s
thinking on the pre-Oedipal stage of psychological development, drawing on Heidegger.
Loewald believed the ‘integrative experiences’ between mother and baby, replayed by the
analyst and patient, offered the foundation of psychic development and therapeutic change
(Chodorow 2003). Primitive ego and mature ego modes of experience, ‘mentation’, offer
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Orsi also deals with the persistence of lived religious experience that is often overlooked in wider social
and cultural contexts (Orsi 2004).
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