Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Rizzuto focuses on the internal, psychological world.
I am not dealing with religion … it’s too big … I am dealing with that aspect of
religion that has to do with an internal disposition to acquiesce, or rebel, or deal or
use patterns of religious behaviour offered by the community’ (AMR 320-322).
Religion is logically religare means “to connect with”, that puts divinity in the centre
… and to have a divinity you need a narrative and to have a religion you need a
meta-narrative. So all religions have meta-narratives … and the contemporary world
has become postmodern (AMR 407-418). 438
Mollon views religion from a holistic perspective ‘beyond the false identities that we all
have to function with … beyond language, something beyond our existing knowing …
people are always … wanting to get beyond those false identities’ (PM 360-363). The
implication is that not engaging with religion and spirituality leaves a person unable, even
with the help of psychoanalysis, to fully transcend a false identity. 439 Mollon finds common
ground for religion and spirituality.
There is a mystery at the heart of it … it goes beyond belief … structures of dogma,
it’s about being open to the sense of something more than we can know directly …
having access to the source of life, of love, of truth … to that realm that we might
call God … without ever believing that one can fully grasp it … however we try to
speak of it, it is going to be constrained or distorted by … the limitations of our
language … all our efforts to think about God are going to involve distortions
somehow (PM 396-407).
AN thinks ‘with any patient … you’re exploring their religion because we all have …
internal religious systems which … to some extent analysis uncover(s) a system of
religious-like beliefs that person may not even know they possess’ (AN 556-561). 440
438 Rizzuto quoted ‘“In the beginning God created the heaven and earth”; “at the right time the fulness of time
the Son of God came to redeem man”. These biblical references are to Genesis 1:1 and a paraphrase of
Galatians 4:4-5.
439 Or in Winnicottian terms, the false self. See (Winnicott 1965).
440 AN later added ‘codified religion is an attempt to solve the suffering of man’ (AN 710-711) and ‘religious
sentiment that’s to do with accepting the suffering’ (AN 711-712). Acceptable religion engages with
suffering ‘there’s a need to accept a kind of wound which can be conceived of in various religious senses, but
there is a kind of ungainsayable suffering and so I suppose religion that engages with suffering, as opposed to
religion as a solution to suffering’ (AN 714-717).
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