Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

understood beyond the limited clinical confines explored by Bergmann and Kernberg. 556
Just as the defining of spirituality needed to recover the dimension of love as a descriptive
category (see chapter one), the same task faces psychoanalysis. 557 As I reflected further it
became clear to me that underpinning it all is love, a word so remarkably absent from
psychoanalytic literature. 558 Grotstein sees this as an aspect that needs to be recovered
when he writes, ‘The discovery of love was incidental to the epiphany of an aspect of self
that could love. This is the essence of the other half of true intersubjectivity’ (Grotstein
2002b:
89).
A careful reading of the text of this thesis reveals love as a hidden thread woven through
many forms of religious, spiritual and psychoanalytic engagement. Love can be understood
as an aspect of ontological, psychological and theological dimensions intrinsic to human
nature. 559 Love can also be understood as an over-arching component of spirituality
expressed in myths and narratives often enshrined in religious texts. 560 Love is perceived as
a particular, though not exclusive, quality that stems from a Christian faith tradition that
adds to the analytic and intersubjective dimension (Campbell 2005). 561 Three interviewees
specifically mentioned ‘God is love’, without a specific biblical reference in mind. 562
Oden combines theological and analytic insight when he comments,
556 See theme 9 ‘Love’ in chapter twenty-three.
557 Symington sees the root of genocide, Holocaust and mass madness as the consequence of the absence of
love (Symington 2008).
558 Sayers being an exception as she adopts a wider, biographical perspective that goes beyond the clinical
dimension (Sayers 2003). Wright also has a moving passage on this. See (Wright 2009: 184). It is also a
theme found in Grotstein’s later work (Grotstein 2000, 2002b).
559 Further details from the thematic analysis are found in chapter twenty-three.
560 Discussion of this is found in chapter one. See also a discussion of stories and narratives in chapter
seventeen.
561 Pfunder writing from a Sufi perspective adds ‘our suffering took place within a context of love, an invisible
spoken presence that I could feel unfolding in the background’ (Pfunder 2005: 156) before concluding ‘All
these seem deeply enhanced by Sufi experience, the art of Being, being present in the present moment … a
remembering of Origininary Radiance, in the context of love’ (Pfunder 2005: 163).
562 This phrase ‘God is love’ comes from 1 John 4:16.
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