Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

enormous. In the conclusion I have highlighted some of the patterns and trends but it cannot
be comprehensive. Most of the chapters in part B deserve doctoral study in their own right.
My research offers an overview that charts the landscape more comprehensively than has
been done before. My hope is that this will enable other researchers to identify areas they
can usefully take further.
Conclusion
This research is a reflexive narrative involving the researcher, the person-to-text analysis of
the current literature and the person-to-person engagement with psychoanalysts. It
concludes by offering an interpretation that sacred psychoanalysis has emerged as a
Weltanschuung influencing an increasing number of psychoanalysts within contemporary
psychoanalysis, and with the potential to influence many more as an increasingly confident
voice emerges. It exists in clusters of people, texts, and locations that have been given voice
through an emerging pluralistic ethos within contemporary psychoanalysis. The roots of a
sacred psychoanalysis are found in: the phenomenon of a re-discovery and re-examination
of the role of religion and religious experience; a re-visioning of Freud’s Jewish identity; the
emergence of a generic spirituality; an expansion of the role of the unconscious as a place of
mystery and the mystical; and a valuing of person-to-person intersubjective encounter
drawing on analytic and ontological resources. Sacred psychoanalysis consists of a
theoretical framework of engagement, and the formation of a new vocabulary to more fully
account for the yearnings and experience of the individual human psyche/soul.
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