Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

While autobiography is vital and offers unique insight it can be problematic. When religion
and spirituality are based on one personal experience and the danger of n equalling one,
with an uncritical naivety.
You can talk about your own experience … I’ll learn something from that but don’t
start making huge … generalizations about ‘What is religion?’ or ‘What is
spirituality?’ based on the fact that you practised Buddhist meditation for the last 5
years or that you suddenly found yourself going back to your Synagogue or … you
have suddenly joined the Assemblies of God (JJ 705-710).
Such experiences are ‘so private and inward you don’t subject it [religion, spirituality,
Buddhism] to analysis and it … has a taken for granted quality which is naïve’ (JJ 800-
802). Some psychoanalysts saw ‘the importance of religious practice and not just religious
thought’ (JJ 55) that builds links into spirituality not simply as abstract beliefs, rituals and
traditions. ‘This world of candles and incense, and statues and it was aesthetic and it
touched something in me very very profoundly’ (JJ 65-67). ‘It is true increasingly I’ve
come to think of religion and spirituality as practices in … the same way that I think about
psychotherapy as a practice’ (JJ 835-837). Out of a lived experience of religion and
spirituality the self becomes uniquely shaped and available as a resource in the analytic
encounter.
So I would say … at a deep level … I am as a religious and spiritual person … I
really think of it in terms of the use of self … the relational orientation … opened up
a space where people can really talk about self in therapy and … the fact that I have
a religious practice … affects who I am (JJ 1366-1373).
Religious experiences are more common than generally recognized. ‘When I lecture … I
expect an analyst would take me aside and tell me the story of a religious experience and
then always ends with this comment “I’ve never said that to my analyst”’ (AMR 197-200).
Some classically trained psychoanalysts discover religion offers a lived experience that can
rarely be spoken about in their analytic world. Grotstein sees aspects of psychoanalysis and
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