Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

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know that noisy dialogue between hard thinkers I think increasingly does not appeal to
most of us, I think there is more awareness (pause, soft) that the world is very
complex and simple solutions even hard psychoanalysis so to speak are just not good
enough.
AR: So in some ways it might be that psychoanalysis has become relocated within the
cultural understanding of our world in one, twenty or thirty years ago it would have
been a hard science evidence type approach to say well psychoanalysis says the future
of religion is an illusion, Freud said this and that would have been taken pretty much
as read by a lot of people
DB: yeah
AR: Whereas I think obviously postmodernism has broken to some extent the power,
of the hold of master grand narratives
DB: yes
AR: that we can’t look for global solutions in that way and maybe it’s the shadow side
of postmodernism is that it’s not that you don’t believe in anything but can you
believe in anything is the paradox, you can’t believe that but what can you believe in?
DB: The answer is the contemplative position (laugh) despite all that.
AR: So there is you are saying you are suggesting is there are new ways of bringing
aspects together that different analysts are trying to develop uhm (pause) because
certainly if I look at the analysts that have written about spirituality (pause) it is quite
hard to find them. I mean I think Ana-Maria Rizzuto’s book was very influential, but
that came out in 1979 followed by Meissner, you can track a strand, a particular strand
DB: yes
AR: a route, but in terms of British perspective there are occasional articles and
references in journals but until uhm (pause) well there was a 1990 conference
‘psychoanalysis and religion’ held at the Freud museum
DB: Oh yes
AR: and Ivan Ward edited a book of that so the chapter by, did you contribute to that?
DB: Yes, yes. A little book ‘Why is psychoanalysis another religion’
AR: Yes. I remembered that as I was driving here this morning. I’ve got it somewhere
I would have re-read it but really that seems to have been the first time that it was
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