Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

At the end of the interview AL spoke movingly about her marriage in an Anglican Church,
reflecting the background of her husband, and out of the warm relationship with the minister
agreed to have her son baptized so that he could make his own choices later on. I missed
the opportunity to probe a little more into a latent spirituality expressed by AL but noted the
fact that she reveals this to me as a minister of religion.
Unconscious encounter
There was a car alarm sounding in the car park below AL’s office and she offered to close
the window, expressing the hope it would soon stop. The alarm is much louder on the tape
than my memory recalled offering several potential meanings. Firstly, the capacity to both
hear and not hear as I tuned-out what was clearly intrusive. A key aspect of my research
methodology is to capture what so easily becomes edited or tuned-out. By entering into the
interview encounter, attuned to the presence of conscious and unconscious associations, new
and revealing dimensions of knowledge can emerge. Secondly, adapting the concept of
symbolic unconscious communication in a series of reflective questions: Was this session
going to be alarming? Was I going to ‘scare off’ AL who had previously communicated
that she did not feel she had any expertise in this area? What ‘windows’ were going to be
opened or closed and was I going to see into the window of AL’s soul/psyche?
At another level what the ‘sound’ of the alarm does is to draw attention to the ‘sounds’ in
the interview that are difficult to capture in textual form. The quality of laughter, the
passionate responses, the amusing questions, the soft bird-like cooing of hmn hmn, the
pleasurable engagement, and the empathy for others. Above all there is a sense of
playfulness with sounds, words and ideas that recalls Winnicott’s emphasis on play as the
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