Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

mystical journey can be seen as an attempt of the conscious to enter the unconscious and in
Blanco’s terms experience ‘emotion, a mode of pure being from which unfolds the creative
imagination … true psychical reality … mute silence … and deep peace’ (Bomford 2006:
256). 328 Theologians and psychoanalysts uninterested in the mystical will not find such
arguments compelling yet there is a possibility of creative parallels for those who do
(Bomford 2006). The importance of the mystical is that it confronts recipients with an
experience that illuminates or exposes prior ontological choice that is paradoxically both
comforting and challenging.
Sixthly, psychoanalytic critics raised significant concerns. Some see mysticism as a distinct
religious experience that does not fit within psychoanalysis as they are two different
categories of thinking, experiencing with differing ontological and epistemological
concerns, particularly if a classical definition of psychoanalysis is adopted (Frosh 2006).
Similarly mysticism can be seen as a particular form of discourse that is not the sum total of
religious experience, just as psychoanalysis is another form of discourse (Bomford 2006).
While there may be apparent similarities they are two differing thought forms and
languages. While they invite comparison they can only be linked at the most general and
superficial level (Frosh 2006). Psychoanalysis can offer insights into mysticism but it can
never explain it without reducing it to a list of concepts that fail to capture the essential
experience apart from its religious context (Ostow 1995). Forms of mystical and
and secondary psychological processes are linked to symmetrical and asymmetrical thinking leading to bilogic
‘a logic for bi-modal reality. This blends two logical strands of thinking: symmetric (dissolving
differences) and asymmetric (promoting differences), both of which can be observed in emotional
experiencing such as dreaming and everyday life’ (Ginzberg 2006: 301). This allowed the possibility of both
believing and unbelieving in God, not in contradiction nor in opposition to analytic thought. Matte Blanco
also saw a place for the mystical dimension, though Matte Blanco’s ‘deeply held Catholic beliefs’ find little
place in analytic writing and ‘must have been frowned upon in the psychoanalytic movement at certain times’
(Jordan-Moore 1995: 1036).
328 Matte Blanco is described by Gordon as the ‘Chilean mystic’ (Gordon 2004: 31).
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