Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Mollon adds ‘I do get a sense of delight when I hear that kind of thing’ (PM 493-494), while
Lemma has been changed by her clinical work.
My attitude to religion and the function of religion in people’s lives has changed
dramatically … particularly the work I have done … with survivors of torture and
refugees where often they will make reference to the thing that … kept them going
in those most horrible moments was of some kind of faith. I have been profoundly
moved by those stories in a way that I find it hard to put it into words, I mean, I just
feel my god this sustained them, it was a life force, however you understand,
whatever it really means it doesn’t matter, this thing called faith helped them to
survive (AL 292-305).
Around half of the interviewees maintained a traditional analytic stance of very limited self-
disclosure, 450 dealing with issues if raised by the client/patient, some of whom specifically
sought an analyst who understood issues of religion or spirituality. 451 Bobrow experiences
clients coming for psychoanalysis who want someone familiar with spiritual practices, not
as a collusive strategy but as a creative engagement with the whole person. Rubin similarly
adopts a whole person approach, but saw a potential problem through collusion or artificial
compartmentalization if the focus was kept solely to religious or analytic issues rather than
the clinical needs of the patient. This would limit dialogue and be detrimental to the needs
of patient. The best approach is to open a therapeutic space allowing an unconscious
presence of personal religious or spiritual being where there is an awareness of ‘the
analyst’s own spiritual viewpoints … [shaping] the intersubjective field’ (JR 32-33).
Others saw the importance of meditation in offering a stillness that matched Freud’s evenly
hovering attention (Brenner 2000). This stillness allows the analyst to get into the depths of
450
This is an important and complex debate within psychoanalysis. See Gensler, Hart and Hadley’s chapters in
(Willock, Curtis, and Bohm 2009).
451
Often discovered through their publications. A paradox of the analytic stance of limited self-disclosure
occurs when analysts become authors where in their writing for another context, they become self-revealing.
This has been my clinical experience which I had not fully appreciated earlier in my practice when I produced
an autobiographical text (Ross 1997).
272