Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

PART C. METHODOLOGICAL CONCERNS, INTERVIEWS AND
THEMATIC ANALYSIS
A central feature of this thesis is a critical examination of religion, spirituality and the
sacred in the lived experience and understanding of psychoanalysts, framed by their clinical
practice within contemporary psychoanalysis. While psychoanalytic societies and training
have been scrutinized sociologically and anthropologically (Kirsner 2000; Davies 2009)
little research has focused on the lived experience of psychoanalysts, especially in the area
of religion and spirituality. 338 The subject of part B, the engagement between religion,
spirituality and the sacred in contemporary psychoanalysis found in text-to-text encounter,
offered important insights but to build on this contextual analysis and to enter into the lived
experience of religion and spirituality requires a person-to-person encounter. This resonates
with a move from an I-It encounter to an I-Thou encounter as advocated by Buber (Buber
1987) and as experienced in the analytic relationship (Molino 1997), which also offers a
hermeneutic understanding (Brink and Janakes 1979). The very essence of the
psychoanalytic encounter is a two-person dyad, meeting in a clinical context that frames and
becomes part of the therapeutic process. This encounter forms a narrative that is rarely
spoken and shapes the narrative of this research.
Chapter one and the introduction identified my relation to the research in two distinct ways.
Firstly, the research narrative is vitally linked to the researcher’s personal narrative (Hedges
2010), which raises the question ‘What does the concept of narrative mean?’ as used in this
thesis? Underpinning the conversations that took place in the research are ontological and
338 One exception is Simmonds’ PhD thesis with a wider focus including psychoanalytic psychotherapists as
well as psychoanalysts in Australia and the UK (Simmonds 2003).
167