Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

encounters with Grotstein where there was a level of knowing and unknowing, conscious
and unconscious (see chapter twenty-one) but a revealing of love. At the end of my series
of interviews with leading and authoritative figures in the psychoanalytic world, examined
thematically and reflexively, this is a vital dimension that underpins sacred psychoanalysis.
Sacred psychoanalysis is the attempt to experience love, consciously and unconsciously,
through face-to-face encounter but which can only ever be through ‘a glass darkly’ in that it
is beyond words within a domain of the ineffable and the mystical, and ultimately within the
realm and being of O, god/gods and God. Like the aleatory object mentioned earlier, each
relationship where there is the presence of a belief in an Other has the potential to
experience the in-breaking or the Thouness of God where ‘love is between I and Thou’
(Buber 1987: 28). Adopting Phillips’ insight that, ‘because our languages of love are
versions of theology and epistemology, they are relentlessly redemptive and enlightening’
(Phillips 1994: 41), each encounter has the potential for intersubjective space identified by
the interpretative framework developed earlier. Such an event is revealing - the mirror
clears for a moment and is no longer dark - is experienced as an overwhelming, a numinous
presence, and translated as love leading to a transformation of being. This then is my
interpretation of religious and spiritual engagement in contemporary psychoanalysis, ‘sacred
psychoanalysis’.
Other stories - an alternative narrative of research
The purpose of doctoral research is to present a clear thesis that can be tracked through the
subsequent pages, traced through the literature, discerned in qualitative engagement and can
add critical insight. The eventual clarity does not always betray the messiness and disorder
of entering into such research at depth. Here are several examples.
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