Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

cause it becomes pathological as seen historically in fascism and genocide (Bollas 1992)
and currently seen in religious fundamentalism.
Just how psychoanalysis transforms a person, for all its technique, is still mysterious.
‘Freud released us all to be continually mysterious to ourselves and others’ (Bollas 1999: 1).
Bollas attempts to capture this as ‘a type of autobiography, as a realization of our place in
the mystery of an embracing intelligence, as a new form of the self’s habitation, as a new
form for thinking, and as a new type of relationship’ (Bollas 1999: 181). Bollas sees the
psychoanalytic encounter as an opening up and ‘moving the patient towards ‘O’, Bion’s
sign for infinity’ (Bollas 1999: 192) as a form of deep and mysterious subjectivity before
concluding ‘If there is a God this is where it lives, a mystery working itself through the
materials of life, giving us shape and passing us on to others’ (Bollas 1999: 195).
Bollas offers another object in his work, the aleatory object, by which he distinguishes a
transformation that we seek as opposed to the transformation that happens spontaneously. 553
Other analytic writers see the vital importance of such psychic events communicated
through Likierman’s concept of the sublime (Likierman 1989) and Klein’s concept of the
ineffable (Klein 2003). Wright also takes up these themes and applies them to the sacred.
Like Bollas he locates the transformational encounter in the pre-verbal, sensory, object
relating of early mother-baby existence that all can experience as ‘an intuition of the sacred’
(Wright 2009: 161). Wright adopts Buber’s critique of religion’s desire to control and
institutionalize, where the vision is tamed, and sees the need for ‘further breakthrough to the
553 Bollas ‘is making a significant distinction between objects we not only desire but also unconsciously create,
on one hand, and objects which come into our lives by unpredictable chance, the latter of which “object-use”
us … it seems to unearth or cause to epiphanize the “unthought known” within us’ (Grotstein 2002b: 83).
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