Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

PM agreed to an interview as a spiritual responsibility. JG embraced me. AL discovered
and talked about religion in ways she had not imagined.
Secondly, transference ‘denotes a shift onto another person … of feelings, desires, and
modes of relating formerly organized or experienced in connection with persons in the
subject’s past whom the subject was highly invested in’ (Denis 2005a: 1776). This happens
unconsciously: ‘part of the patient’s emotional life which he can no longer recall to memory
is re-experienced by him in his relation to the physician’ (Freud 1910: 51).
I brought into the interviews the experiences of being a psychodynamic therapist who uses
transference and counter-transference as a therapeutic tool and a minister of religion who
has often borne the transferences of others. I could therefore identify various forms these
took in relation to different interviewees. JB became a female authority figure that I
experienced as challenging, and confrontational as well as personally affirming. With AL
the transference was very positive, something that I had experienced before the interview in
a previous meeting but even more so in the interview itself which had a playful dimension
akin to Winnicott’s transitional space. AN was a male authority figure that I experienced
(like JB) as challenging and confrontational though I warmed to his directness and sensed
much more than I was able to see or AN share in the time and context available. AP offered
to me an idealized transference in terms of his writings, his persona and his consulting room
(see earlier in this chapter) which evoked feelings of desire that could be interpreted - as
with AL - as an erotic form of transference.
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