Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Areas of dialogue include: the nature of consciousness; autobiography as a source of
theological and analytic engagement; 454 issues of personal transformation as ways of
making sense of life ; complementarity of language; the nature of good and evil; 455 working
with pathology; 456 and the use of religious practices to experience an inner analytic self
engaging body, mind and spirit. 457 Jones finds ‘certain resonances and parallels between a
relational understanding of psychoanalysis and certain themes in religion … that don’t exist
in ego psychology or … classical Freudian psychology’ (JJ 958-962).
Such dialogue allows spiritual retreats to include psychoanalytic reflection on the dynamics
of the spirit/psyche – a feature mentioned by Jones, Rubin and Bobrow. Grotstein takes a
broader perspective arguing they are two dichotomous descriptions of one reality.
The essence of the religious experience in psychoanalysis … [is] psychoanalysis
pretends to be atheistic and it’s really very religious … psychoanalysis goes on
inside the individual in the unconscious, it’s an ineffable entity … it has to do with
the universality of psychoanalysis as a mystical entity, which has its own
functioning. It just needs somebody to ignite it’ (JG 1479-1494).
In line with his rejection of an objectified God, Grotstein imagines the unconscious as an
ineffable entity that acts in a manner theologians attribute to the action and being of God
(Macquarrie 1966). Yet this vital relational dimension - God/unconscious/ineffable entity -
exists apart from human personhood but comes to ‘being’ through relational encounter that
both religion and psychoanalysis provide in different forms.
454 ‘That sounds really interesting’ (DB 712).
455 In terms of answering complex questions such as these, theologians are seen as sharing common ground
with psychoanalysts in wrestling with the challenge of providing answers. ‘I think that’s a tradition that we
have a lot to learn from and doesn’t involve us being religious but there are very great minds who have been
involved in thinking through the implications of different ways of thinking, I very much feel I could be
interested in that form of thinking without having to feel that it would sign me up’ (AN 729-733).
456 Several interviewees made reference to clinical examples of this occurring. An important part of the
psychoanalytic role is to critically engage with religious beliefs, addressing any pathological dimensions, in
order to free the person to discover a healthier spiritual way of being.
457 ‘Raising them to a higher level of being and interaction and connection with the world’ (JB 728-729).
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