Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

travelled with Ferenczi to explore ancient monuments in Sicily, including ruined temples at
Selinunt and the well-preserved fifth century BC Doric temple at Segesta. The letter reads,
Selinunt 4.9.10.
The temple may be that of Segesta, where we performed our devotions yesterday,
but you’ll certainly be pleased that we are religious even to this extent.
Yours
Freud Ferenczi 7
Freud reveals a playful sense of humour, not lost on Pfister, and in a subsequent letter
describing some of the tensions inside and outside the psychoanalytic world, Freud makes
reference to another temple: ‘Building the temple with one hand and with the other wielding
weapons against those who would destroy it - strikes me as reminiscence from Jewish
history’ (Freud and Meng 1963: 45f.). 8 The details of this initial research can be found in
appendix three.
While other discoveries were to be made in the Freud-Pfister correspondence, a review
point in research supervision clarified that the sweep of the thesis was too broad and I made
the decision to limit the study to examining religion, spirituality and the sacred in
contemporary psychoanalysis from the 1970s onwards. However this initial research
highlighted the importance of a biographical approach, where two narrative voices can be
clearly heard. The faintest and subordinate voice is of Freud’s life-long fascination with the
puzzle of religion influenced by: his birth into a culturally Jewish but non-practising
household (Rainey 1975) 9 ; the psychological influence of a Roman Catholic nanny (Grigg
7
Freud-Pfister 27R.
8 th
Dated 10 October 1910. This is a quotation from the book of Nehemiah, chapter 4.
9
See chapter eleven.
9