Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

• We discover the eternal unconscious in our own unconscious and we contribute to
the lives of others through the unconscious, but we are time-bound facing the
finitude of death and non-existence
• Relational engagement at depth leads to new revelations, new connections, and new
insights
Yet underpinning it all is love, a word often absent from psychoanalysis or examined within
very narrow parameters. 378 The biblical passage that came to mind in the interview was
from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13, though the verses quoted come
from the end ‘through a glass darkly, but then face to face’ which sums the encounter with
JG, and at the end of a whole series of interviews, a theme that underpins sacred
psychoanalysis. Sacred psychoanalysis is the attempt to experience love, consciously and
unconsciously, through face-to-face encounter but which can only ever be through a glass
darkly in that it is beyond words within a domain of the ineffable and the mystical, and
ultimately within the realm and being of O, god/gods and God.
I sat in the large, comfortable and ordered study of JG, ‘Call me Jim, I’m an American’
located on the upper floor of a guesthouse where he sees his patients. JG, an 83 year-old
man of medium height and build, grey hair and comfortable but conservative dress, looked
so unlike the revolutionary figure he has been deemed. He spoke with warmth, charm and
insight. He appeared to want to listen to me as much as I wanted to listen to him. Yet my
blood pressure was still recovering from several hours before. I arrived at my anticipated
time, having enjoyed the walk from UCLA on a balmy 32-degree sun-drenched November
378 Benjamin and Sayers are exceptions to this general trend (Benjamin 1988, 1995; Sayers 2003).
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