Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

The twin trees symbolized my personal rootedness in being a dizygotic twin, while the
church in the background represents the lofty, fading but ever-present spiritual presence of
God. The tangled, colourful, vibrant undergrowth corresponds to my unconscious
becoming conscious through a new quality of seeing. 40 I cannot fully unravel these threads
but I can now more clearly identify them so they are not unspoken or unknown assumptions
woven into my research in the tangled skein of psychoanalysis and the sacred. Like
Beckford,
Reflexivity has been my starting point for making connections between my story and
the ‘generalised other’ in my work. In my published books, an auto/ethnography
moves beyond the stilted subjectivity vs. objectivity debate and affirms intersubjectivity
as a means of determining knowledge … the boundaries between, art,
life and ethics is dissolved by personal narrative (Beckford 2007: 111).
Ontological dimensions
A philosophical grounding in ontology, epistemology and questions of methodology are
essential for research that engages with contemporary social sciences (Denzin and Lincoln
1994, 2005; Blaikie 2000; Grix 2001, 2002) and the contemporary human condition
(McLeod 1994, 2001). Determining a clear ontological perspective is an important task but
one in which terms are ‘commonly misunderstood’ (Grix 2001: 26). Ontology is an
examination of the metaphysical nature of Being and forms a crucial role in establishing the
paradigm/s that research is based on (Denzin and Lincoln 1994: 107f.). While ontology and
metaphysics were central to medieval philosophy they were superseded by the philosophical
debates emerging from the Enlightenment, which had a significant impact on theology,
psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis (Gay 1969; Ellenberger 1970; Sulloway 1979).
Enlightenment thought formed the dominant discourse that became a ‘paradigm’ for
40 See Elkins on art as unconscious religion (Elkins 2004).
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