Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Coltart was a highly regarded British psychoanalyst but ‘was recognized, with a certain
amount of surprise by British psychoanalysts as being very interested in Buddhism … I
don't know she had the sort of influence that those people had in the States’ (DB 163-165).
Coltart wrote ‘two essays on psychoanalysis and Buddhism … she … suppressed it, if
memory serves me for years’ (JR 342-347). It is clear that in the psychoanalytic climate at
that time it was not completely safe to belong in the ‘mainstream’ and express religious or
spiritual beliefs and practices. These had to remain hidden, leading to the ironic situation
that ‘the tolerating of … Coltart’s … spirituality or the religious involvement of … Coltart’
(JR 484-485) by the psychoanalytic establishment, psychoanalysis enters into a
‘compromise formation’. When faced with two conflicting or competing demands, one
becomes repressed. Such an approach is deeply unanalytic and betrays an often
unacknowledged and deep-rooted functional atheism in psychoanalysis. A more positive
analytic position, and one that parallels the Zen concept of ‘beginner’s mind’ and the
psychoanalytic stance found in Coltart’s work is to adopt an open stance of assuming
nothing a-priori in order to fully enter and understand the patients’ world, conscious and
unconscious. 433
433 Other names mentioned as significant in contemporary psychoanalysis (other than those interviewed)
especially in connection with religion and spirituality were Akhtar, Blanco, Bomford (an expositor of Blanco),
Britton, Davids, Epstein, Gargiulo, Mayer, Meissner, Miller, Parsons, Rycroft, Safran, Sorenson, Spezzano,
and Wright. Of this group four are deceased, two were approached but declined the request for an interview,
three never replied to an approach via mail or e-mail, one is not an analyst or therapist, and one was
interviewed but not included due to the overwhelming amount of data generated in the existing interviews. As
a number of my potential interviewees had also contributed to a key text by Black (2006) I was also mindful of
the danger of replicating material also already in print.
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