Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

As the interview developed I very much warmed to PM and I experienced him moving from
an initially cautious, guarded professionalism to a more open, relaxed stance facilitated by
my contact with Paul Goodliff and Patrick Casement, people he knew and respected. Later
in the interview PM recognized me more fully and wished there had been more time to hear
from me. There is the use of humour, my self-revealing of my own ideas, which at times
felt as if I was informing PM of developments he was not aware of. Yet I found it difficult
to accept PM’s compliment at the depth of research that I had done on his previous work
and I still found myself being apologetic that I had not read all his work. As the interview
progressed there was a talking over each other and at times it seemed as if I was speaking
PM’s words for him.
Unconscious encounter
This interview left me wondering again about the power of the unconscious, not in an
obvious ‘slip of the tongue’ identified by Freud, but rather in philosophical, ontological and
theological terms. The unconscious felt more present in this interview, transcription and
analysis than most others. I quoted PM’s writing on the unconscious and in doing so
unconsciously identified what I believed and felt was happening in the dynamics of the
interview and its aftermath.
At the deepest level of the unconscious, pure symmetry prevails. All is one and the
whole is reflected in the smallest part - an insight as old as human culture. In the
depths of the unconscious, in pure symmetry, we find the Godhead, the awesome
Other within - the ‘Subject of subjects’, which can never be the object - the source of
our being and fount of sanity and madness, of creation and destruction, of Grace and
Terror (Mollon 2000: 71).
This links with another unconscious association in the interview – the reference to C.S.
Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. The Narnia stories offer us entry into a mythical
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