Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

sacred, and at this point religion is spiritually renewed’ by the ‘individual’s experience of
the sacred’ (Wright 2009: 161). Wright re-affirms Bollas’ spiritual vision as found in his
language.
Bollas is aware of the religious resonance of what he writes for his language is
redolent with religious expressions. ‘Reverential’, ‘beseeching’, ‘supplication’,
‘transported’, ‘uncanny’, are just some of the words he uses. But the word ‘sacred’
occurs repeatedly and is the closest he can get to this earliest experience: ‘The
sacred,’ he says, ‘precedes the maternal’ (Wright 2009: 165). 554
A sacred psychoanalysis therefore consists of an interpretative framework that locates the
core aspects of being expressed in religious, spiritual and psychoanalytic language, which
frames a space within which exists a threefold hermeneutic of translation, transition and
transformation. This has a perichoretic form as in a dynamic dance of the sacred, which
choreographs, weaves and moves together, yet allows for a free-form in-breaking of that
which is Other. 555
Love – a missing dimension of the sacred in psychoanalysis
All the psychoanalysts I interviewed when talking about their patients revealed concern,
compassion, empathy and passion. In one particular interview the analyst needed to take a
telephone call while I was still in the room, a situation they had mentioned was a possibility.
It revealed to me a different dimension of the person I had up to that point experienced in
the interview, redolent with those qualities of concern and compassion. Yet I hesitate to use
the word love, as it seems like an alien intruder into the psychoanalytic vocabulary when
554
Jones adds, ‘By rooting the experience of the sacred in the most basic of human dynamics, Bollas implies
(like Otto) that we are all home religious (inherently religious), that we all have the potential for
transformative, sacred experiences’ (Jones 2002b: 161).
555
Fiddes uses this term to apply insights from his understanding of a theology of the Trinity in pastoral
contexts (Fiddes 2000a).
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