Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

These were individuals who before joining the faith community were in deep
psychological trouble … I couldn’t help but obviously see the religion as a refuge
from … issues that were extremely painful and actually threatened to completely
disintegrate the personality and somehow in finding this new family and a sense of
belonging, direction, structure … was immensely containing for them … I never
interpreted that … I would never have felt it appropriate to challenge the meaning
that religion held for them. I saw my role as helping them to deal with problems that
brought them to therapy now rather than … engage in a deconstruction of what
religion had meant (AL 516-531).
AN believes analysts should adopt a neutral stance but recognizes that the unconscious
makes it impossible for the patients not to know something of the analyst, including their
beliefs for or against religion. In the interview AN adopted a neutral stance towards me (a
minister of religion) however his strong feelings about the dangers of religion came across
powerfully.
Dialogue partner
Phillips identified a problem with dialogue ‘because the language is almost organized to
exclude each other … even though there seems to me there are a lot of links and I certainly
think theology in a way is the most interesting way of reading about psychoanalysis’ (AP
845-846). Other interviewees saw these traditions in dialogue whilst recognizing the
problem that each can exist in isolation, ‘like a defensive split it’s so compartmentalized that
it doesn’t get evaluated’ (JJ 830-831). Black sees the future of psychoanalysis requiring ‘a
dialogue with adjacent disciplines, neuroscience, philosophy, religion … these things need
to come in and influence us and hopefully us to make a contribution to them’ (DB 67-70).
Jones notes psychoanalysts engage with spirituality but fellow academics find it difficult to
engage with psychoanalysis.
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