Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

that offers a cross-over or transfer by identifying two hermeneutic approaches. Their
juxtaposition allows for correspondence and communication between by delimitating an
area of shared interpretation, yet allowing each approach to retain its distinctive identity.
Such an approach requires knowledge of another language or other conceptual systems. An
important point made in my interview with Black (DB), and implicit in most subsequent
interviews, was how difficult this is. Due to the cost, nature and timing of psychoanalytic
training, normally after a prior career in another discipline, and given the monastic lifestyle
of practising psychoanalysts described by Coltart and Benjamin as a vocation (Coltart
1993a; Benjamin 1997), the opportunity for acquiring a sufficiently rigorous understanding
of religious, spiritual or theological issues is limited.
Most of the psychoanalysts I interviewed had acquired a wide range of ontological, religious
and spiritual beliefs, including formal theological training or spiritual practice for some,
prior to their psychoanalytic trainings. They had acquired a different language with which
they could translate psychoanalytic ideas and experiences, their own and their patients’, into
religious, spiritual or sacred concepts. The earliest forms of religious and spiritual
engagement in contemporary psychoanalysis adopted this hermeneutic of translation, as
seen in the work of Rizzuto and Meissner who drew on the theological language from a
Roman Catholic tradition, one as a Jesuit priest, the other as a lay-person influenced by
Casel. 507 They found themselves in a position of believing in an objective God as the
source of all love, life, truth and being, as expressed in orthodox and classic Christian
507 See chapters five and seven for more details of Rizzuto’s work on god-representations and the Catholic
influences in her background (Rizzuto 2004b).
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