Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

self, enables multiple selves to be identified and integrated drawing on psychic and spiritual
resources. Grotstein defines this as a transcendent position, Black as a meditative position
(both drawing on traditional Kleinian ‘positional’ terminology). I would categorize this as
transcendent Otherness that draws from the Bionian/Grotstein tradition of psychoanalysis,
exemplified in the work of Grotstein. Bion, ‘was very deeply involved with religious
metaphors … Bion’s interest in O came from the religious mystics, particularly Meister
Eckhart … the Kabbalah and its mystical tradition, so Bion would … hyphenate the
mystical with the spiritual’ (JG 337-347). This forms an overlap with psychoanalysis ‘he
would call it the spiritual vertex of psychoanalysis and I think it had to do with that
mysterious area that is of O’ (JG 351-353). 489
In parallel with this there is also an intersubjective Otherness that draws from the
intersubjective and the relational aspects of contemporary psychoanalysis, exemplified in
the work of Eigen and Benjamin who see ‘there is only one reality, there’s just different
ways of looking at it, they overlap at times’ (JB 200-201). A unifying level of analytic and
spiritual engagement takes people to another level, or another place of reality variously
named as God, other/Other or the ‘Third’. I see both forming a dizygotic sacred Otherness
in contemporary psychoanalysis that is transitional and mystical – experienced rather than
defined – that fits within the interpretative framework of sacred psychoanalysis outlined in
chapter eleven of part B.
489 Bobrow supports Grotstein’s view of Bion but adds ‘Bion is a mystic, at heart. If you really read Bion, he’s
a mystic. But he’s not a Buddhist mystic or a Hindu mystic or a Christian mystic, he’s just a mystic’ (JBR
249-253). Similarly, Jones finds common ground for Christianity and Buddhism through the mystical text The
Cloud of Unknowing. Rubin was changed by his mystical experience resulting in him searching for meaning,
which led to Buddhist and psychoanalytic thought and practice.
290