Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

seen was me disappear over the edge. I wondered if this was an unconscious portent of
things to come?
On the day itself the train journey was uneventful, the reception at the clinic was familiar, as
I had previously interviewed another person there. AN met me and took me to his office
where he explained that he was limited to an hour as he had another meeting to attend.
Personal ontology
AN’s ontological views fit within a Modernist scientific, philosophical, rational and realist
framework. Psychoanalysis has the status of being a foundational body of knowledge; a
body of truth and the task is to work this out in clinical, cultural and societal contexts. In
current postmodern and pluralist contexts truth has become a difficult word, but AN wishes
to retain it ‘with a small “t”’ (AN 104). AN comes to this as a passionate atheist and so
finds a fit between his view and Freud’s, ‘I feel myself wedded to a tradition of Freud and
Marx’ (AN 167-168). For AN there is no ‘ultimate being’ or ‘ultimate core’ (AN 179), yet
he values tolerance of other beliefs and values. We exist as rational, bodily creatures with
yearnings and strivings but no soul. Life is about being passionate, and for AN ideas are
passionately believed, held, argued, re-discovered as a vital way of being human.
Secondly, man is a tragic being where ‘there is a pain at the centre of our being’ (AN 420).
‘Real life … is … thinking, breathing, sweating, labouring, suffering man engaged in his
own tragic condition in life’ (AN 419-420).
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