Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

embraced that relate to this thesis are: sociology (Mauthner and Doucet 2003), religion and
culture (Lynch 2007a, 2007b), psychotherapy and counselling (Etherington 2004; Jenkins
2006; Hedges 2010), and psychoanalysis (Elliott 2004). More recently reflexivity has been
advocated as a highly creative and ‘cutting edge’ development of thinking and research in
these disciplines (Macbeth 2001; Lynch 2007a), while needing to avoid the dangers of
narcissistic self-indulgence (Lynch 2005) or becoming so generalized that the concept has
little substantial meaning (Beaudoin 2007). Yet reflexivity in some limited form, and
despite positivist counter-tendencies, has always been central to Freud’s attempt to
understand his dreams and central to the whole psychoanalytic enterprise. 38
My starting point, like Freud’s, is that I am no disinterested observer looking for objective
knowledge as I am entwined with conscious and unconscious threads woven through my life
intellectually, experientially and aesthetically (Sullivan Kruger, Harrison, and Young 2008).
My personal story significantly shapes the therapeutic stories and research narratives I hear
and share in (Hedges 2010). These first came together in Evangelicals in exile: Wrestling
with theology and the unconscious (Ross 1997) that became a reflexive account of my life
rather than a conventional autobiography. Consequently ‘In this way, the personal narrative
as an exemplar and contributing model of self-storying is a reflection of an individual’s
critical excavation of lived experience and categorising of cultural meaning. This is then
shared within a public domain to provide the audience with a meaningful articulation of
human experience’ (Alexander 2005: 423). The choice of Monet’s ‘The Church at
Varengeville’ (1882) for the front cover of my book was highly symbolic.
38 Freud wrote to Fliess on November 14 th . 1897 ‘I told you that the most important patient for me was myself;
and then … my self analysis, of which there was at that time no sign, suddenly started … My self-analysis
remains interrupted. I have realised why I can analyze myself only with the help of knowledge obtained
objectively (like an outsider). True self-analysis is impossible’ (Masson 1985: 279f.).
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