Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

PART A. THE CONTEXT, DEFINITION AND HISTORY OF
RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY AND THE SACRED IN
CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOANALYSIS
CHAPTER ONE. PSYCHOANALYTIC, PERSONAL AND
METHODOLOGICAL CONTEXTS
No qualitative research involving the experience of the researcher emerges out of a vacuum
(Denzin and Lincoln 2005). As stated in the introduction, this research has a personal
motivation that is utilized as a tool with which to engage the complex areas of religion,
spirituality, psychoanalysis and the sacred.
1. Psychoanalytic context
There is a long-held and dominant view in psychoanalysis that Freud and religion do not
mix. Writing in 1961 Rieff commented ‘It is on the subject of religion that the judicious
clinician grows vehement and disputatious. Against no other strong-point of the repressive
culture are the reductive weapons of psycho-analysis deployed in such open hostility’
(Quoted in Earle 1997: 220). Writing in 2009 Akhtar added ‘Sigmund Freud’s … unease
about the transcendent “oceanic feeling” … led to a long chain of subservient
psychoanalytic thinking which took Freud’s atheism at face value and regarded
psychoanalysis and religion (and mysticism and spirituality) as antagonistic’ (Akhtar 2009:
269), although the situation has begun to change. Any shift requires a reappraisal of Freud’s
views on religion balancing his theoretical accounts of the subject (Freud 1907, 1913, 1927,
1928, 1930, 1933a, 1933c, 1939) alongside his much more complex and paradoxical stance
to it when linked to, and interpreted by his autobiography and his correspondence (de
Mijolla 1996; Mahony, Bonomi, and Stensson 1997).
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