Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

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AR: But somehow I hear you say that doesn’t seem to be impacting the general stance
which is, you you tell me is quite defensive, it’s about you know we need to sort out
this, this and this and it is a very internal discussion I think that the Church is pursuing
at the moment rather than the one that is being creative and actually trying to make
connections with completely different traditions and I guess there is the whole notion
of fundamentalism and that needs
DB: yes
AR: to be grasped, grappled because in like the conclusion you wrote to your chapter
in Beyond Belief which is actually saying some of these things whatever if you choose
to believe a particular God it is a choice whether that is good or bad but that religion
has a lot more to do with in its desire to connect both over time and rather than this
individualist spiritual supermarket which, where you can take any combination you
like from the pick-n-mix counter and may have meaning in that moment but doesn’t
necessarily transform people in terms ongoing values or pursuit of justice or peace,
some of the moral dimensions that I think you talk about in certainly some of your
earlier work you talk about religion having this moral dimension that psychoanalysis
doesn’t always engage with in the same (pause, quiet tone) way.
DB: Yes, well I’ve been interested, in fact particularly interested in you know I said
ontological, fundamentally it’s an ontological project I think it’s the sort of ontology
out of which moral values arose so to speak and have a stability which if one just
takes a psychoanalytic approach to values one can’t find a ground for the stability of
principles because it all to with feeling and according to Klein and Winnicott, and I
very much agree with them, you know if we treat somebody badly we feel bad about it
very often and then we want to make reparation and that’s a moral response but it is
only a feeling response and you can’t say it has any authority over somebody else who
might have a different feeling response to treating somebody bad shrugging their
shoulders saying well ‘I couldn’t care less’ you can’t say one of them on purely
psychoanalytic grounds is better than the other . I think you have to have an
ontological commitment before you can ground your morality in principle. So I’ve
said that much too quickly but (meaning?), anyway that’s the kind of thinking that is
behind that, yes.
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