Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

aspects of their being. My engagement in this revealing was to explore their ontology
related to beliefs, values, experience and traditions reflecting religious and spiritual
identities. The presence of myself as my-self and a representative religious figure with
their-selves as themselves and representative psychoanalytic figures opens a space for the
intersubjective engagement of humanness that some see as an expression of love (Wright
2009) and I later argue is an expression of the sacred. A critical reflexive analysis of the
conscious and unconscious dimensions of these interviewees and encounters provides eight
areas of reflection following immersion in this psychodynamic and intersubjective interview
context.
The past in the present - ontological presence
The premise that ontology precedes epistemology shaped the critical examination of these
psychoanalytic interviews. Psychoanalysts train after completing other professional
trainings first: JB as an academic; PM and AL as clinical psychologists; AN and JG as
psychiatrists; and AP as a psychotherapist and writer. 381 They therefore evolved an
ontological being having committed themselves to academic (feminist critical social
perspectives - JB and AL), philosophical (atheism - AP and AN; Marxist - AN and JB;
metaphysics - JG) 382 or psychological (PM and AL) forms of thinking and meaning-
generation prior to their psychoanalytic trainings, which have been retained through and
beyond their trainings. Examining underlying beliefs about what it is to be human reveals
aspects of a self that shape the work we do but which have a taken for granted quality, the
381 Although AP is an insightful writer on and critic of psychoanalysis, his professional affiliation is as a
psychoanalytic psychotherapist rather than a psychoanalyst recognized by the IPA. In AP’s terms he is a
psychoanalyst as he acknowledges and works with the unconscious, is steeped in Freud’s writing and has
undergone two analyses with Khan and Bollas.
382 JG is difficult to categorize as his work combines elements of Christian Science, quantum physics,
mathematical sets and Eastern spiritual traditions.
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