Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

addition of a third cultural context - psychoanalysis in Ireland, particularly in its
Lacanian forms, detracted from the in-depth focus I intended. A decision was made
therefore to exclude the two Irish interviews. 346
5. A specific criterion for selection was how much the analyst was able to explore issues of
religion and spirituality. Two analysts interviewed were highly regarded in developing
innovative forms of contemporary psychoanalysis (Spezanno and Stolorow) and while
the interviewees were personable and informative they generated few insights
concerning religion and spirituality. 347
6. Technical failure of equipment or my operating of the equipment meant one interview
was limited to 15 minutes. Running out of recording space on a mini-disc and the
failure to press the recording button sufficiently on a digital recorder meant little was
captured in what was a very interesting interview with Jim Gooch, another analysand of
Bion in Los Angeles.
This resulted in the adoption of eleven interviews (one analyst’s interview was conducted in
two parts, with a day between) with eleven psychoanalysts in the UK and East and West
Coast USA for transcription and analysis. The selection of eleven interviewees offered
‘interpretative sufficiency’ for a thematic narrative analysis. The bricolage developed to
examine religion and spirituality in contemporary psychoanalysis utilizes a new
development within qualitative research termed a psychoanalytic intersubjective interview
methodology that uses the researcher’s skills of detecting and using transference and
346
This generated mixed feelings that somehow I was letting down these interviewees and the others I later
excluded.
347
Spezzano had agreed to the interview out of his general interest through a friend and colleague Randy
Sorenson, who died the year before. Sorenson’s work was published in Minding Spirituality (Sorenson 2004).
Stolorow thought the interview was more related to philosophy than theology.
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