Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

theology held by the Roman Catholic Church. Both held specific theological beliefs in an
objective external God who exists outside the human psyche, yet whose very presence is
experienced within the human psyche in forms of religious experience. This religious
experience, while having a spiritual and theological dimension, is also a psychic event to be
understood psychoanalytically.
Rizzuto understands this through the power of words found in theological and analytic
contexts.
I learned that there are words and words: those that can change people and things
and those that cannot. Liturgical and sacramental words or the words of the priest in
confession could bring about help, transformation, forgiveness. Those
transformative words, however had to be said in the right place and circumstances,
with the right attitude, and be addressed to or heard from the right person …
Transformative words must be sacred and come from the committed heart of the
believer … The preceding description may seem very remote from psychoanalysis,
but it is not. Psychoanalytic praxis also requires a particular relational frame and
context between two people to give their words the power to transform. A ritual of
meetings and times and mode of talking must be established to give the words
spoken the necessary context to activate their transformative power. Words spoken
outside the context cannot reach that sacred space of psychic life where the core of
the patient’s desires, fears, and conflicts lies hidden from him or herself (Rizzuto
2004b: 437f.).
Rizzuto and Meissner find a shared experience that can be translated into two different
languages. For Rizzuto it was a specialized object relationship, a god-representation, which
preceded Freud's Oedipal drama, which illuminated the possibility of future belief or
unbelief. Rizzuto's work has been groundbreaking in disciplines external to psychoanalysis
(see chapter seven), yet less than half the interviewees had any knowledge of her work.
While Rizzuto is clear that her work is not about belief in God or a theological project it
does expand the possibility of normal and non-pathological religious and spiritual beliefs,
understood psychoanalytically. Rizzuto has been able to open up the language of religious
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