Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

When asked, Lemma shook her ‘head ruefully’ (AL 478-479) and said that the first time she
had ever thought about it at all was when I met her two years previously and introduced the
subject in our conversation. ‘Of the people I have trained with, I can’t think of a single
person for whom religion was an active part of their lives … religion … never featured’ (AL
812-815). AN agrees that nothing from religious or spiritual traditions ‘has permeated
through’ (AN 505) into psychoanalysis.
‘Religion’ elicited a large range of emotional and critical responses, clearly not a subject
that people felt neutral about, unsurprising given its pejorative history in psychoanalysis.
All the analysts identified an aspect of religion, at least culturally, in their past and for some
it was still a present reality. 437 All had religious backgrounds in their family of origin or
strongly held systems of belief that have the capacity to act like religion with around half
actively belonging to a faith/spiritual tradition.
Jewish Buddhist/ Anglican/ Atheist/ Spiritual/ Roman Christian
Eastern Episcopalian Agnostic Holistic Catholic Science
6 4 3 3 2 2 1
Over half (6) of the interviewees offered a definition of religion. Black distinguished
between mythical and revelatory/monotheistic religions, but found it difficult to define
spirituality other than phenomenologically. Rubin offered,
the Latin religare which means to bind … and I was struck … with the analogy, with
the irony that religion is supposed to link people, bind them and instead it is
separating people … another meaning of “bind” … is to tie in knots and I think
that’s often what happened (JR 248-256).
437 Either philosophically or in their spiritual practices.
262