Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

eligious experience arising in every relational encounter and views psychoanalysis as a
mystical encounter that is both known and unknown facilitated by the context of
psychoanalytic meeting to allow space for this to take place. 448 Bobrow adds,
I’m very interested in people’s religious practices and how … they affected them.
I’m also interested in their … stuck places, which is often represent(ed) in their …
personal persecutory religions … So I’m very interested in religion … for me Zen
Buddhism is a religion, even though it’s not theistic … it is a religious practice for
me, it’s not just a healing practice or a secular practice (JBR 363-370).
Clients/Patients and clinical encounter
Rubin and Jones see one of the changes in the climate in which psychoanalysis exists and
that has made an important impact on psychoanalysis itself has been the increasing desire to
examine religion and spirituality. This has been ‘patient driven’ where people,
disenfranchised from organized religion, come to ‘psychoanalysts to talk about religious and
spiritual matters, because it’s the only place they have to go’ (JJ 972-929). Jones adds ‘so
the combination of this explosion of material being available in the public domain, the
growing interest in the culture at large and … people coming to their psychotherapist,
psychoanalysts where we talk about these things’ is making an impact (JJ 945-948).
Patients help the analyst in this regard.
I’ve always found that my patients, the ones that I work with for any length of time
… start to talk to me about spiritual or religious concerns, I don’t introduce it, they
start to talk to me about it … it’s part of human beings’ spiritual strivings, enquiry
and people probably get a sense that I’m not going to react negatively … with
anxiety or hostility to religious or spiritual communications (PM 368-382). 449
448 A feature he attributes to his own experience of being in analysis with Bion (Grotstein 2007).
449 ‘It will sometimes happen that a person I have been seeing in therapy will suddenly turn in a religious
direction. Somebody has led them to start going to a church for example and so prayer suddenly becomes part
of their life or they have they say people are praying for them. Then things start happening, positive
developments in their life, circumstances seem to conspire in a benign way for that person and so you get a
connection between the prayer that’s being talked about and the circumstances in the person’s life’ (PM 482-
491 edited).
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