Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

sacred psychoanalysis represent a new analytic movement with definable features
constituting a new Weltanschauung or is it a diffuse phenomenon within psychoanalysis that
parallels developments seen in contemporary culture?’ 504
Sacred psychoanalysis as advanced in this thesis takes two particular forms. Firstly, sacred
psychoanalysis is an interpretative framework that provides a structure which integrates the
religious and spiritual engagement that has been evidenced in contemporary psychoanalysis
for the last thirty years. It offers a way of understanding or interpreting this development,
which does not require religious or spiritual belief or practice in order to be truth-bearing
and meaning-making. Any psychoanalyst from any background, theistic, atheistic, non-
theistic, agnostic, pantheistic or pluralistic can utilize this interpretative framework to make
sense of the different expressions of religion and spirituality found in contemporary
psychoanalysis. This is examined in detail in chapter twenty-six.
Secondly, sacred psychoanalysis offers a hermeneutic understanding that consists of three
over-lapping narratives. This allows each analyst to situate him or herself within a narrative
frame through which they understand the experience of the religious or the spiritual. These
hermeneutic understandings are focused around the themes of translation, transition, and
transformation and are examined in chapters twenty-five to twenty-seven. Before
examining these, some further reflection on hermeneutics is required and is found in the
following chapter.
504 An overview of these developments can be found in the work of Gordon Lynch (Lynch 2007a, 2007b).
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