Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

thesis. The longest part of the thesis, part B, (approximately twenty-three thousand words)
is condensed from a much larger draft version running to sixty thousand words. A balance
is sought in setting up a critical dialogue of different voices, textual and clinical, leading to a
difficult decision to limit the space given to each area.
Sixthly, in part, as a counter-balance to pathologizing tendencies inherent in psychoanalysis,
I have focused primarily on religion and spirituality as positive aspects of human
development. A fuller account requires acknowledgment that there can be destructive
dimensions to all faith positions, where beliefs and actions can be held so fundamentally
that the results are destructive for the person, family, group, community or society (Schreurs
2002; Ostow 2007). This is clearly seen in the development of religious terrorism in the last
decade (Jones 2002a, 2006, 2008), though this has a long, complex and often over-looked
history. 569 Eigen deals with such destructive elements (Eigen 2001a) and Grotstein utilizes
metaphors of demonic ‘third forms’(Grotstein 1997a) and a ‘black hole’ to capture these
dimensions (Loly 2009). 570
Finally, a specific problem is raised for any researcher when they are researching a field that
is growing dramatically. When I began in 2003, the field was large, but in 2010 it is now
569 ‘It is easy to confuse adequate with inadequate sacred objects, such as substance use, dogmatism, cults, and
the unhealthy idealization of significant others. It is equally easy to embrace unhelpful schemas of the sacred,
including the idea that the divine is universally punitive, that it is capricious and unpredictable … unhealthy
attributions to the sacred can have deleterious effects on emotional and physical functioning’ (Gurney and
Rogers 2007: 971f.).
570 Ostow adds, ‘although we ordinarily think of the word “spirituality” as carrying powerful and admirable
values, it can be used to promote perversity … Spirituality can be degraded to spiritualism or perverted to the
demonic … The adolescent meditator in the lotus position and smoking marijuana does not ascend to a higher
level of spirituality than the biologist who is trying to construct a theory of the evolution of behaviour’ (Ostow
2004: 60). Rizzuto also recognises, ‘God may enter psychoanalytic treatments in many forms. God may be
used as a defence against the transference, secretly displacing onto God, in prayers and rituals, feelings and
wishes that may appear frightening if overtly expressed to the analyst. God may be used as a resistance, when
the patient insists that s/he cannot talk about certain matters. God can be used also for satisfying one's own
wishes about not having to feel guilt’ (Rizzuto 2001: 44).
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