Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Lemma located her ambivalence to religion from her upbringing that was both Jewish and
Italian, dominated by a strict Roman Catholic culture acting as a harsh super-ego which for
a long time formed negative associations.
The personal questions you asked me made me think that when I was in my first
analysis I certainly talked a lot about my own experience of Catholicism and I chose
an Italian analyst and I am sure part of that unconscious reason for choosing an
Italian analyst must have been an assumption, right or wrong, that they would have
understood a lot about this early life … I was charged with a kind of antipathy … I
saw it as hypocritical … I came away from that … analysis without this rage …
something obviously was worked through (AL 992-1010).
Mollon described a conventional Anglican background but adds ‘I think I always had
personally a … religious sense and a … spiritual curiosity’ (PM 419-422). 446 In a very
different American context Grotstein reflected ‘I am a Godly man in my own way and I
wasn’t always aware of it but … I got it from my mother … always looking for God, she
knew she could not find it in Judaism … but she found it in Christian Science (JG 1842-
1849). 447 Benjamin felt it was easier to write an autobiographical account than an account
about spirituality that felt ‘very very personal’ (JB 99). Psychoanalytic theory can be
variously interpreted and debated, yet to discuss spirituality has a personal and private
quality – replete with an intimacy that fears rejection as it touches upon deepest parts of
oneself in relation to other/Other that is beyond or a mystical experience that defies rational
engagement.
446 Both religion and psychoanalysis had their limitations for Mollon as he possessed ‘a dislike of being
cognitively and conceptually restrained … being able to explore and enquire freely has always been quite
important to me’ (PM 422-424).
447 What further influenced Grotstein were the traumatic years he faced as an analyst following Bion when
Grotstein was caught up in institutional conflict within analytic circles in the late 1960s and continued until the
early 1980s. This has left him with passionate beliefs about and opposition to the power of institutions –
analytic and religious (Grotstein 2002a, 2007, 2009c).
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