Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

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increasingly privatized which I think does polarize it and one of the reasons why
fundamentalism is apparently greater than I think it is
DB: At large, yes
AR: because people think you can do anything you want in private you can wear a veil
in private, you can cover your face but don’t take it into the public so I think that’s
one of the quite complex debates underpinning some of the recent events (reference to
the new story of Muslim women being banned from wearing the hajib in schools)
DB: yes
AR: but eh so my fourth question is and you might have covered this already is David
is what about the apparent emergence of religion and spirituality in contemporary
psychoanalysis? I know you do in the introduction to your book give an overview but
why do you think it is happening now in a way that it wasn’t happening in the 1980s
for instance certainly in Britain?
DB: It is very striking. I think that there are probably several reasons for it. I mean I
think that the 1960s it really did make a difference so all of us now who are
psychoanalysts in our 60s or so are all children of the 1960s and there was a kind of
openness to ways of thinking then which I think inevitably has influenced us however
much we may think of ourselves as doctors or psychiatrists or social workers or
whatever our professional backgrounds have been uhm (pause) so that is very very
different from someone with the background of someone like Freud growing up you
know with hard materialistic 19 th c. science as his background. I think inevitably
postmodernism and feminism and all those kind of things softened those hard edges. I
think the other thing is actually the sense of the world being in crisis, the ecological
crisis, (pause) the lack of anywhere one can look in the political world for (pause)
something that seems to be morally based and sound and I think this creates a
profound sense of unease in most of us and so there is a kind of looking around now
for what, on which one can base hope for the future really and you know the kind
confident belief in materialistic scientists which led to things like communism and
socialism as being more or less secular creeds that isn’t around any longer. You have
the stridency of Richard Dawkin on one side, a scientism v. the possibly exaggerated
ideas of fundamentalism and creationism around. Like you I am not sure how much
of that there really is, I don’t think I’ve ever met a creationist in my life, but you
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