Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

the physical and metaphysical use of place’ (Pole and Morrison 2003: 139) – in my case the
physical space of the consulting room of the analyst and the intersubjective space of the
unconscious. Both frame the encounter as we engage in religious, spiritual and analytic
discourse with the potential to evoke the sacred.
Jessica Benjamin (JB)
Jessica Benjamin is a pioneer in the fields of relational psychoanalysis, intersubjectivity and
gender theory. She is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York and is on the faculty
at the New York University Post-Doctoral Psychology Program in Psychoanalysis and
Psychotherapy. She is best known as the author of The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis,
Feminism and the Problem of Domination (Benjamin 1988), Like Subjects, Love Objects:
Essays on Recognition, Identification and Difference (Benjamin 1995) and Shadow of the
Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (Benjamin 1998). Jessica Benjamin
is also an associate editor of the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues and a founder and board
member of the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy
(IARPP).
Meeting Jessica Benjamin
The red 1-line subway train clattered into 18 th street station on 7th avenue. The press of
commuters parted momentarily as I was swept off the train in a wave of people, along the
platform and up the stairs to be deposited at the borders of the fashionable and thriving
Chelsea district of Manhattan. Two streets away lay my destination, the consulting room of
JB, and the subject of my interview. Two streets of tenement houses, apartment blocks and
renovated warehouses studded with the occasional art galleries, fashion boutiques and a
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