Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

signs of abating. Despite the sheer volume of material, it also became clear that it was a
narrative that had not yet been told. This therefore became an important and central feature
of my research, as a critical, contextual account and analysis of key people and publications
on religious, spiritual and sacred engagement with contemporary psychoanalysis. 29
However, in and of itself this was not sufficient as it only established one voice and one
narrative. In reading the Freud-Pfister letters, I saw a relational encounter and dialogue with
Freud that embraced religious and spiritual discussion and difference. Such themes eluded
many of the biographies on Freud (Jones 1953, 1957, 1958; Clarke 1980; Isbister 1985; Gay
1988; Breger 2000); the accounts of Freud’s theories and techniques; and psychoanalytic
histories (Hale 1995a, 1995b; Schwartz 1999; Makari 2008), with a few notable exceptions
(Gay 1987; Vitz 1988; Palmer 1997; Rizzuto 1998). Such discoveries shaped my
methodology.
3. Methodological context
A reflexive methodology is adopted which combines concepts drawn from ontological,
epistemological and intersubjective perspectives. These are best suited for examining
religion, spirituality and contemporary psychoanalysis for three reasons. Firstly, if
psychoanalysis is an epistemological tool that allows us ‘to confront the most difficult of
human problems of human experience’ and ‘unrivalled in the depth of its questioning of
human motivation’ (Fonagy in Perelberg 2005a: vii) 30 it needs to address issues of religion
and spirituality (Field 2005; Black 2006; Ross 2006) and this opens the realm of ontological
29
Its purpose is more significant, in terms of critical engagement, than a literature review commonly found in
theses and dissertations.
30
This is debatable and demonstrates a lack of awareness about intellectual discourse on theological and
spiritual issues as found in the work of Ford (Ford 1992, 1997, 1998; Ford and Muers 2005), Pattison (Pattison
1994, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2007) and Fiddes (Fiddes 2000a, 2000b).
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