Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Signals of transcendence
It is too easy to reify experiences of transcendence and enshrine them in some religious
ritual. 542 Psychoanalysis consists at best of a human-to-human encounter at a depth
facilitated by a psychoanalytic encounter where there are ‘signals of the sacred’. Such
‘signals’ arising in the experience of an other in the room as shared psychoanalytic space
also point to an Other if this can be conceived by the people involved. In the course of the
interviews different themes emerged as to what such ‘signals’ might be, although I did not
use the term or ask this as a direct question. 543 The themes that emerged embrace:
• Self-revelation
• Honesty
• Openness
• Insight from the past
• A sense of felt presence
• Embracing not-knowing
• Loving and being loved
• Insight into personal Being
• Moments of Otherness
• Feeling alive
Each of these ‘signals’ occurs in a psychoanalytic context and requires interpretation, where
those psychoanalysts able to draw on religious or spiritual traditions can discern a language
542 For a helpful discussion of the danger of this see Otto’s The Idea of the Holy and texts by Jones (Jones
2002a, 2006, 2008). Ross and Plante also address this issue (Ross 2003; Plante 2007).
543 A signal points to something beyond and is adapted from its first use of this term by Berger (Berger 1990,
1967). It is not used in the Lacanian sense of sign, signified or signifier.
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