Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

with my father, the fact of being a twin, my being a minister of religion, what theology I
read, what my hopes were for the future. Three offered specific comments about the
spirituality of the encounter using such phrases as: a ‘quality of light’ (JB); ‘consummate
analyst minister’ (JG); and a ‘duty to God’ (PM) to see me yet I am all too aware that this
aspect of the encounter was deeply felt but difficult to categorize. I came away energised by
these meetings as if something in my being was ‘stirred’, that something creative was taking
place and that a level of meeting was experienced that transcended simple words and had
the hallmark of the sacred.
Four other reflections arose in this reflexive analysis. Firstly, the importance of eye-to-eye
contact. What cannot be communicated or transcribed from an audio-recording is what
happens between the eyes of two people. 389 Eye contact is profoundly important in human
development as it establishes patterns of engagement and agency that we continue
throughout life. The value of a mother or care-giver’s gaze is powerful in the development
of the individual’s sense of self and patterns of attachment, while the absence of that gaze is
experienced as deeply shaming (Wright 1991, 2009; Mollon 2002). This also has profound
theological implications for the capacity to be seen metaphorically by god/God/Goddess –
as the source of all religious and spiritual experience (Goodliff 2005a). 390 Immersion in the
interviews recalled that JB and AL engaged in a great deal of eye contact that I noted as
significant. Psychoanalytic reflection on the power and nature of the maternal gaze and the
place of the feminine in contemporary psychoanalysis is a key feature of JB’s work.
389
This could be captured through a sophisticated video recording involving three cameras, one on each
participant and one viewing both to mark as an index. It is unlikely this would be possible out of a studio
context and would lose the naturalness of the consulting room as the psychoanalytic space that I regard as
essential for the emergence of unconscious processes.
390
The theologian John Hull explores how theology changes with the experience of blindness (Hull 1990,
2001).
241