Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

integration and the re-experience of unity and timelessness akin to Rolland’s ‘oceanic
feeling’ and found in mysticism. It was only in the late 1970s that he fully addressed
religion commenting ‘some of these things I have discussed I have wanted to say for a long
time’ (Loewald 1978) and Black notes the importance of this in terms of the timing and the
stature of the speaker, ‘in this courageous lecture we glimpse the oppressiveness of the
conformist culture of psychoanalysis which at last was lifting’ (Black 2006: 13). Loewald
succeeded in offering a place for the religious and the psychoanalytic experience to engage
with each other creatively as religion ‘can serve to keep us open to ways of knowing and
being that are rooted in the primary process with its unitary and timeless sensibility’ (Jones
1991: 54). Meissner offers a similarly positive and balanced account of mysticism in
psychoanalysis (Meissner 1984a: 150f.). A detailed examination of mysticism facilitates ‘a
theology of grace and mystical prayer that is more open to the perspective of psychic
variables and psychoanalytic understanding’ (Meissner 2005: 556). This encounter can also
be paradoxical experience of the self and God understood in object relations terms following
Winnicott. Davids links psychoanalysis with the Sufi mystical tradition where the mystic
transforms the unconscious, illusory and phantasy image of God formed in early experience
into a real relationship with the God who really is, as found in their inner world (Davids
2006).
Fifthly, Bomford and Grotstein view the mystical as the route into the deepest
unconscious. 327 Bomford makes a distinction between the mythic and the mystic, where the
327 An Anglican priest and theologian, though not a psychoanalyst, Bomford has written primarily about God,
religious truth and Matte Blanco (Bomford 1990, 1999, 2004, 2006). Matte Blanco was a Chilean
psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who did his analytic training in Britain supervised by Anna Freud and James
Strachey. He went on to pioneer the development of psychoanalysis in Chile. He used mathematics and
philosophy to revise Kleinian theory and used mathematics to view the unconscious as infinite sets. Primary
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