Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

562). An analyst might say a little of their religious or spiritual background at the end of a
long analysis even if that is not something they make public. Such disclosure is normally
kept within the analytic dyad although several interviewees mentioned this to me as a
researcher.
Some analysts were critical of the implicit atheism found within psychoanalysis.
Let me say something about the clinical aspect of this … pathologizing of religion
… the terrible irony is that it’s profoundly anti-analytic … to start out a priori … to
think atheism is normative and … religion is pathological, … you are showing is
you’re not really analytic (JR 483-492).
All analysts thought there was long-standing prejudice towards religion which some thought
was slowly changing. Yet there are still unspoken assumptions of functional atheism within
the history of psychoanalysis that has resisted adaptation. One analyst felt ‘officially it is as
though I do not exist, [am] recognized or talked about. Unofficially, private institutes invite
me all of the time, analysts talk with me all the time, … Kernberg has used my ideas to
write … about religion’, recognition coming ‘though the back door’ (AMR 183-186, 192).
Lemma also saw it as a neglected area,
It … must be operating in terms of both what I bring … because of my own
experiences and my patients’ experiences, because everyone has had some exposure
to religion whether it is to by fighting against it or engaging with it or not thinking
about it … Given that so much of psychoanalysis is really also about thinking of
one’s own beliefs and what we do with our beliefs … it is striking to me that
religious belief is an area that I neglect (AL 972-979).
Autobiography and lived experience
Most interviewees stated their engagement with religion and spirituality in an
unembarrassed way in contrast to their perception of these terms in psychoanalysis. This
response was self-determined, as I had not asked questions about their familial past; it was
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