Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Akhtar concludes succinctly, faith ‘takes one into an area of psychological experience that,
by reason of being dimly lit, turns out to be scary and alluring’ (Akhtar 2009: 104).
Channel for the divine/Other/I-Thou/O
Bion and Grotstein see ‘transformations in O’ as a vital aspect of being, that is
simultaneously a desire and a destiny, which cannot always be sought, and simply
experienced (Bion 1965; Grotstein 1983, 2007). Grotstein adds,
It is my belief that theologians, shamans, mystics, philosophers, mathematicians,
physicists, and others, each from his/her own perspective, have been preoccupied
since the beginning of time with the paradoxes and mysteries of existence, whose
ultimate template can be thought of as the domain of the ineffable or the numinous.
In contemplating the awesome mysteries of the preternatural and the divine, they
were delving, I now believe, in the twin yet unified realms of mystery, of the two
unknowns, one of which Freud ultimately located within the unconscious (Grotstein
1999: 1).
Mollon sees the psychoanalytic encounter as a place of profound meeting, if one is willing
to see beyond some of the inherent limitations of a psychoanalytic view of the world, and
comes closest to Buber’s ideas. Martin Buber in Ich und Du (1923) published later in
English as I and Thou (1939) highlighted psychical and spiritual encounter in a way that
evolved Otto’s ideas and brought them into the realm of ordinary relationship. He
distinguished the I-Thou relationship, into which we enter with the fulness of our being,
from the I-It relationship, in which we relate to the Other in functional or conceptual ways.
If Thou is identified as God/Yahweh, the divine Thou enables human I-Thou relations to
reflect the Thouness of the Divine. A true relationship with God must be an I-Thou
relationship in which Other is truly met and experienced. In I-Thou, Buber expressed a
paradoxical symmetry that finds echoes in Matte-Blanco’s work where a giving of oneself
to another, and viewing another as more than oneself, leads to a greater sense of self and
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