Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

1933b: 158f.). Freud vigorously refuted that psychoanalysis was a Weltanshauung, 32
offered a critique of religion as the dominant Weltanshauung, 33 content that psychoanalysis,
as part of a scientific Weltanshauung required no other validation. ‘Without recognising it,
Freud adopted his own Weltanshauung, which was colored by his own stoic ethics’ (Kirsner
2006).
Despite Freud’s denial, his claim to ‘special right’ resulted in psychoanalysis acting as if it
were a Weltanshauung, or since Kuhn, a paradigm (Kuhn 1970). 34 Focused on science,
Kuhn’s concept of paradigm examines how we select, know and validate knowledge that
shapes how we see the self, the world, problems and solutions. Paradigms ‘are held with
surprising tenacity, sometimes even in the face of seemingly devastating contrary evidence,
until overthrown by some more successful paradigm’ (Ratzsch 1995: 762). Psychoanalysis
evolved variously as a Weltanshauung, a worldview or a paradigm that excluded God,
denied religion as truth bearing and relegated religious or spiritual experience to the realm
of psychopathology. Contemporary psychoanalysis offers a parallel paradigm where
pluralistic theoretical foundations allow for engagement with religion and spirituality in
non-pathologizing ways. This change can be dated from the mid-1980s, a period when
psychoanalysis was re-visiting its identity and when ‘spirituality’ became increasingly used
in psychoanalytic journals and allied disciplines (Wallerstein 1988, 1992; Rubin 1996,
32 ‘An intellectual construction which solves all problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one
overriding hypothesis, which accordingly, leaves no questions unanswered and in which everything that
interests us finds its fixed place’ (Freud 1933b: 158).
33 This betrays Freud’s limited understanding of religion (Meissner 1984a) and the complex theological
debates that challenge each aspect of his definition of a Weltanshauung (Macquarrie 1966).
34 ‘The net that contains the researcher’s epistemological, ontological, and methodological premises may be
termed a paradigm, or an interpretative framework, a “basic set of beliefs that guides action” (Guba, p. 17).
All research is interpretative … each interpretative paradigm makes particular demands on the researcher,
including the questions the researcher asks and the interpretations he or she brings to them’ (Denzin and
Lincoln 2005: 22).
17