Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

spirit and psyche combine and offer a ‘multidimensionality that adds mystery, possibility
and richness to living’ (Eigen 1992: xvi).
By their very nature the mysterious and the mystical overlap. The mystical form of
engagement was detailed in chapter fifteen but Bomford summarizes the apophatic tradition
and relates it to psychoanalysis where God is,
Being itself … beyond the distinction of being and non-being … God is darkness,
emptiness, absence … characterized chiefly by paradox and self-contradiction … the
mystical journey may be seen as an attempt by the conscious mind to enter the
unconscious … of entering the depths of the soul … Matte-Blanco saw this
unconscious as the source of emotion, a mode of pure being from which unfolds the
creative imagination (Bomford 2006: 256).
Bomford builds on the mystical tradition and experience to creatively engage Christian
religion with psychoanalysis based on ‘transcendental moments’ (Bomford 1999: 150)
encountered through an in-breaking of one aspect of the unconscious to the other.
Symington sees the mystical as a place to encounter O, and the spiritual, but warns of
religion’s attempts to control such direct access to God (Symington 2008). Eigen returns to
the mystical again and again as another thread running through his work, though he does
emphasize absence and dread, which can be shared through intersubjective presence. 548
Mystical encounter is transforming, both validating a profoundness of being human, and
also present when words fail (Eigen 1992, 1998; Molino 1997).
Acts of faith
Bion first developed ‘acts of faith’ to describe in scientific terms, rather than religious or
mystical ‘the decisive moment of interpretation’ (Sandler 2005: 292). ‘Faith that there is an
548
Eigen covers many themes focusing on potentially negative or destructive aspects of the self (Eigen 2001a,
2002).
340