Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Heelas 2000; Flanagan and Jupp 2007; Lynch 2007b). While secularization as a total
project is questioned, it is still a social phenomena. 469 In the USA secularization,
produced a kind of unchurched but not unreligious population … who grew up
without significant affiliation with a religious institution and you had an …
increasing interest in religious and spiritual matters, so where did people go, they
didn’t go to their minister, priest or rabbi because they never had [one] they went to
their psychotherapist (JJ 896-905).
In the UK, Black believes the appeal of Christianity is declining and needs radical change in
order to avoid a retreat into fundamentalism or becoming privatized religious or spiritual
experience. 470 Jones suggests this interest in spirituality has its roots back in the late 1960s
when ‘people either go underground and get really radical … or they go out to Height-
Ashbury and start smoking dope and following the mahraguruyogi or … develop a certain
kind of spirituality’ (JJ 1199-1202). 471 ‘People do not want to talk about religion anymore
… now it is spirituality’ (AMR 394-395). Mollon 472 sees a vital interest in spirituality but
none with religion. ‘All the leading figures in the energy psychology field are or become
very spirituality orientated - that doesn’t mean that they necessarily embrace any particular
religious system or belief system’ (PM 774-776). 473 Lemma was less aware of spirituality
in her British context but saw greater significance of religious and spiritual issues in non-
Western cultures. Psychoanalysis offers its own culture encompassing the whole of life that
469 Secularization is regarded as a Eurocentric and Westernised theory that has limited applicability beyond
these contexts. The same critique is also made of psychoanalysis.
470 Psychoanalysis as a meta-narrative and as an institution is also in decline (Hansen 2009).
471 Jones was involved in the student political movements of the late 1960s.
472 A pioneer of psychoanalytic energy therapy (Mollon 2004, 2008).
473 Callaghan ‘talks about how he used to describe himself as a militant atheist but through his work he says he
arrives at the view that there must be a God … I’m sure he does not embrace any particular religion’ (PM 782-
788). Rizzuto also identifies the trend of spirituality moving away from religion that covers the same decades.
‘So if you need a religion you have to buy a certain meta-narrative … but if you had a spirituality you have the
movement in the opposite direction. Here you are the centre, God is not the centre, you are the centre and then
you begin the search. I am in the search, I am searching for someone there, someplace that will respond …
sending messages “if there is someone there please answer”. So spirituality is a search that seeks peace of
mind, realization of oneself … it does not have (a) meta-narrative, but … a hope that there is something there
that transcends, and they believe that there is something whatever it may be, it cannot be clearly defined’
(AMR 440-449).
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