Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

‘My interest in spirituality has always been there but it got tamed being an analyst because
analysts in general were very anti-spiritual’ (JG 331-332)
Philips gives an insight into the powerful emotions and feelings listed above. ‘We have
been trained to find religious words very very very powerful and you can’t just decide not to
be moved’ (AP 612-614) therefore it is remarkable that religion remains such an
unexamined feature of psychoanalytic training, life and practice. There was a distinct fear
of being labelled as ‘spiritual’ by one participant in the sense of being forced into a category
over which they had no control, yet that same person had written a ‘spiritual’ paper for an
analytic conference including spiritual ideas and practices. For others there was a level of
guardedness. Rizzuto recalled a noted Jewish analyst experiencing a spontaneous religious
experience following bereavement that he was unable to understand and which contradicted
his ‘official’ stance as an analyst. 442 His psychoanalytic understanding of personhood did
not equip him with the ability to engage with something potentially beyond his inner world
– a key dimension found in religion and spirituality.
Being open in the psychoanalytic world about being religious or spiritual and being
psychoanalytic in a religious world is still perceived as difficult, in part due to the non-
disclosing background of psychoanalysis. ‘It was very hard both by temperament and of
course by training. I am not particularly self-disclosing, that was a hard thing to do … I was
living in both of these worlds’ (JJ 530-531). In actuality it is costly to live at the boundaries
of religious beliefs, spiritual practices and analytic presence. It is ‘one thing to say you
want to cross these [theoretical] boundaries but it’s another thing to … really do it’ (JJ 561-
442 Their name has been withheld for reasons of confidentiality.
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