Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

psychological immaturity or pathology. Freud dispensed with religion as a source of truth
and values, but recognized it as a cultural remnant from the past. Freud’s vision for
psychoanalysis offered a worldview that more fully accounted for the whole range and
diversity of human experience (due to its inclusion of an unconscious dimension) than any
that had gone before. 18
Of these two narratives it is the latter that came to dominate the way religion and religious
or spiritual experiences were viewed in psychoanalysis. Bion observed, ‘Psychoanalysts
have been peculiarly blind to this topic of religion. Anyone, recalling what they know about
the history of the human race, can recognize the activities which can be called religion are at
least as obtrusive as activities which can be called sexual’ (Bion quoted in Franco 1998:
113). Psychoanalysts neglected other perspectives that saw religion and spirituality forming
intrinsic aspects of human personhood and worthy of psychoanalytic exploration. 19 Yet
contemporary psychoanalysts find themselves in a discipline whose identity is changing
with crosscurrents of cooperative and competing paradigms. The debate about the ‘one
psychoanalysis or many’, initiated by Wallerstein has dominated recent psychoanalytic
debates about the nature of truth, authority, identity, goal and vision – focused on the issue
of pluralism that Mitchell saw as the future of psychoanalysis (Wallerstein 1988, 1992;
Mitchell 1999). 20 Contemporary psychoanalysis is ‘beginning to integrate some of the
insights of its own fragmented history, and to seek strength in cooperation rather than in
18
This is contested by religious and spiritual accounts of human nature examined in detail in part B.
19
Theological responses to Freud and psychoanalysis were similarly rejecting. ‘Freud does not allow for any
progress in religion … Our own consideration of faith as “acceptance and commitment in the face of Being”
cannot be fitted into the Freudian scheme … we cannot think of the father-image as just a projection’
(Macquarrie 1966: 140). For a discussion of the Christian response to the ‘new psychology’, a popularisation
of Freud’s ideas, see (Ross 1993).
20
White argues that there is an urgent need for ‘constructive cross-paradigmatic discussion’ to avoid the
dangers of eclecticism (White 2008).
12