Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

self-knowledge echoing the words of Jesus ‘For whosoever will save his life shall lose it;
but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it’ (Mathew 9: 24). Used
in psychoanalysis, especially in its relational and intersubjective forms, Buber offers I-Thou
as a potential for a depth of meeting and openness of being, that both experience in a
reciprocal relationship that is conscious and unconscious, opening each party for the
mystery and sacredness of the other, reflecting the being of Other.
Aesthetic and Transformational Objects
The evolution of aesthetics as an important aspect of personhood has a long and complex
history (Eagleton 1990): however a focus on the internal location of creativity has been an
important contribution of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis views art as resulting in an
external object which directly relates to the artist’s inner world and experience. Aesthetics
are inextricably linked to an inner landscape. Different psychoanalytic traditions have
evolved theoretical structures to account for this. Kleinian theorists focus on drives where
creativity emerges as a form of reparation for aggression and guilt, ideas further developed
but linked to the quality of mother-baby experiences by Stokes (Sayers 2003), Meltzer with
Harris-Williams (Meltzer and Harris-Williams 1988), Segal (Segal 1991) and Britton
(Britton 1998). Object relations theorists also focused on the quality of mother-baby
experiences but understood these as representational objects that opened up other object
worlds. Shafranske makes an explicit link between Rizzuto’s god-representations and
Bollas transformational object (Shafranske 1992). 551 Bollas’ ideas represent a unique
551 ‘The model of the transformational object presents a conceptualization on which to bridge representational
processes within the transitional space to an earlier period in the development of object relations. Further, the
search for the transformative within a diverse range of human endeavours, including the religious, may be
understood from the context of the representational world through the model of the transformational object’
(Shafranske 1992: 71).
343