Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

y others. There are ‘resonances and parallels between a relational understanding of
psychoanalysis and certain themes in religion … I think the relational turn has created a
space within psychoanalysis to discuss spirituality in a way that was simply verboten’ (JJ
958-963). Jones added,
I think there were those cultural trends of which psychoanalysis was carried along
but I also think that the return to relationality within psychoanalysis also opened up a
space … people were reading … Winnicott, Kohut, Fairbairn who were clearly
much more open to a religious spiritual outlook (JJ 984-988).
Bobrow describes a similar trend on the West Coast and applies this to a spiritual
dimension:
Its whole underpinnings are shifting … what’s exciting about contemporary
psychoanalysis is that it’s connecting with other traditions and other areas of thought
and practice, from the arts to social theory and social action, including cultural life,
to spirituality and religion, to the biological elements of our nature so,
psychoanalysis, … it has come down from the ivory tower (JBR 33-38).
A transformative experience
The therapeutic goals of psychoanalysis have historically been: the reduction of psychic
anxiety caused by repression; an excavation of the past psyche to gain insight in the present;
and the bearing of suffering as the common lot of humanity without recourse to illusory
Others – all of which represent the philosophical beliefs of Freud but whose limitations have
been identified (Lear 2005). Contemporary psychoanalysis with the hindsight of twentieth
century social, cultural, philosophical and political triumphs and tragedies has seen the
development of ‘self’ as a unique category of being arising from the desire for, and
experience of, multi-textured forms of personal relatedness. So contemporary
psychoanalysis becomes,
a diverse theory of the process of change, … it’s a theory in flux of human change,
and the potentials for human development … the potentials for transformation that
exist in an intimate relationship … and transformation not just of one person, but of
255