Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Catholic Mass, mystical encounter, god-representations and a personal analysis. Loewald
and Winnicott both saw the Eucharist as a symbolic event that had echoes in psychoanalytic
events but saw a need for further transition or transformation (Winnicott 1971; Loewald
1988). Also drawing on a Roman Catholic tradition, Matte-Blanco developed mystery as a
category of his asymmetric and symmetric thinking. There is that which is known and that
which is unknown, existing in unconscious but logical unity that offers the mystery and
paradox of being human. 545 ‘With Matte-Blanco, the category of mystery enters
psychoanalysis as a working principle’ which Eigen links to the Kabbalah (Eigen 1992: 32)
and Gargiulo links to negative theology and apophatic spirituality (Gargiulo 2004a,
2007). 546 In his interview Mollon identifies dimensions of personality that go beyond
traditional psychoanalytic theorizing and which draw on holistic and spiritual traditions. 547
In adopting mystery as a category, psychoanalysis enters the sphere of the sacred where
545 ‘For Matte-Blanco, the psyche is characterized by bivalent logic: the logic of indivisibility (the
unconscious) and the logic of division (consciousness) … each stratum is present in a mysterious way in every
one of the strata which are nearer to the surface. … the indivisible is mysteriously present in the profound
depth of anybody, however covered and asymmetrical the surface may appear; present yet not directly or
immediately grasped. The indivisible is there but it is invisible. (Matte-Blanco 1988, p. 55; italics Matte-
Blanco’s)’ (Eigen 1992: 31).
546 ‘Is this ground … what Lao-Tzu means by our human essence, that which is deep and dark within us ? And
if it is, then a capacity for silent awe, for a quiet acceptance of mystery - which is not simply a cover term for
our ignorance, - is an essential ingredient for any practising psychoanalyst. I think that such an acceptance of
mystery is crucial if we, and I mean both patient and analyst, are ever to experience an enchantment with the
world, notwithstanding how profoundly troubled that it constantly seems to be … What many mystics,
throughout the ages, have tried to inculcate, namely, an encounter with that which is transcendent in human
experience, has been de-mythologized by psychoanalysis. The mystery, we have learnt, is within us, not
outside of us. Psychoanalysis has provided a new space in which to live life, and paradoxically, in doing so, it
has re-found old truths. The only transcendence we can know, now, is an everyday transcendence. Standing
in Winnicott’s shadow we can say that this is good enough’ (Gargiulo 2003: 387f.)
547 Freud also addressed mysterious attributes to items, places, or people deemed taboo linked to the sacred and
the uncanny (Freud 1913). The closest Freud came to this subject area was in an exploration of the ‘uncanny’
where he sets out to ‘solve the mystery’ of the unheimlich, literally translated as ‘unhomely’ which does not
fully translate. Yet Freud himself tells us he needs to translate what the ‘uncanny’ is as it is not something
easily grasped within his experience. He defines it as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is
known of old and long familiar’ including ‘the most mysterious repetition of similar experiences’. His
psychoanalytic viewpoint is that it is what we unconsciously know as ‘secretly familiar’ and is related to the
repressed desire to return to the mother’s womb (All references Freud 1919).
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