Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

experience … but every once in a while their religious experience will have some spiritual
nature to it’ (JBR 375-379).
Others see spirituality as a positive term embracing what it is to be fully human and
overlapping with psychoanalysis emerging spontaneously.
All of a sudden people started talking about religious and spiritual issues in the
middle of this on-line seminar … Eigen was … and what it said to me … is that
there is some resonance in relational psychoanalysis to certain religious and spiritual
themes so there is a natural arising (JJ 992-998).
Mollon embraces spirituality as the higher strivings of what it is to be human while still
subject to psychoanalytic scrutiny and an essential aspect of humanness often denied by
psychoanalysis.
Evolving generic spirituality
By adopting a generic form of spirituality shorn of theistic and religious doctrines, new
levels of engagement can be seen in contemporary psychoanalysis, especially relational and
intersubjective approaches that are similarly shorn of analytic doctrines and institutional
orthodoxy. Spirituality elicits more positive responses, being seen as superior to religious
observance.
Spirituality I think … is actually the core of what it is that people are, it’s a way of
… seeking … how am I doing … trying to connect some larger entity. The question
of what defines … I don’t consider it to be all that important … because I still think
all paths lead to one place ultimately and of course that is where religion is divisive
and problematic whereas the idea of spirituality … suggests there are multiple paths
maybe as many as there are human beings … leading to a universal something …
but I believe there are many, many particularities (JB 361-374).
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