Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

aim was to find psychoanalysts who were willing to explore their work further through a
personal interview. The decision to conduct research by face-to-face interviews rather than
by e-mail, telephone, video-conferencing, or Skype and web-cam imposed certain time and
financial constraints requiring a large investment on my part. This drew me even further
into the research process itself.
I made initial contact with four analysts 344 with whom I had discussed my research that led
to a genuine interest alongside recognition that this was an area they knew little about. One
analyst offered personal disclosure of religious and spiritual matters that they rarely talked
about saying to me, ‘I have a sense I can trust you’. Andrew Samuels, a noted Jungian
analyst, author and academic, gave a robust challenge questioning why I was excluding
Jung. Three agreed to an interview and the fourth suggested other psychoanalysts I could
approach using their name as an introduction. This proved a successful strategy leading to
seven interviews (five in the UK, two in the USA). The second strategy was to make
contact directly with psychoanalysts on the basis of the published work and reputation,
particularly key writers in the field including Rizzuto, Meissner, Grotstein, Jones,
Symington, Rubin and Eigen. This strategy was also successful and led to another nine
interviews. My timetable needed to fit with their availability and geographical location in:
New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Dublin, as limiting myself to the UK
would only have provided five interviews. The advantage was a broader, multi-cultural
perspective offering a psychoanalytic triangulation from North American and Western
344 I had met three analysts through running a series of continuing professional development days for
psychodynamic counselling students at the University of Birmingham between 2003-2007 and we established
a relationship through letter, e-mail and personal conversation. I met a fourth psychoanalyst through the West
Midlands Institute of Psychotherapy who became my first interviewee and the author of the then unpublished
Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21 st Century (Black 2006).
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