Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

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aspect or a regressive aspect of trying to look at something else you would work with
them along the lines perhaps you suggested in your chapter about maybe helping them
find a contemplative position alongside working through a depressive or a schizoid
position
DB: I’m not sure really uhm I mean I was thinking of the chapter in the book by
Fakhry Davids uhm which I think is a very interesting attempt to sort of tease out the
different ways in which a practising analyst might think about the apparently religious
experiences that his patient brings him uhm (soft) I think I would be sort of listening
in something of that kind of way to you know to think how is how is this belief
playing a part in the patient's psychological processes uhm (soft) I don't think that it’s
up to me really to be going beyond that yeah as a therapist
AR: So do you, have you found the experiences in your work as an analyst where
what you are experiencing in the room with a patient might be akin to something you
would experience in meditation in terms of consciousness a state of being or at a
similar it generates in you going back to what we saying at the start of about
contemporary psychoanalysis focusing on the whole aspect, have you had experiences
like that or would you make distinctions between the two?
DB: I suppose I would in the sense that I think in the clinical situation one is attending
to whatever arises in oneself in order to think what is this telling me about what may
be going on in the patient or with the patient so its instrumental really in the clinical
situation in a way that I don’t think it is meditation, in meditation your concerned for
the experience in its own right so I think although there is a certain analogy I think the
idea of the hovering attention of the analyst uhm (pause) descriptively is similar to
some of things that one tries to do in meditation but I think the purpose of it is
different, someone’s attitude to it is different
AR: Yes because certainly in my reading of Eigen’s work it’s difficult to know it feels
much more enmeshed
DB: Yes
AR: And obviously he is situating himself in a different perspective from you so if
you write a book with a title the psychoanalytic mystic it’s a bit of a clue isn’t it that
the discipline is a much greater correspondence and obviously his focus on some of
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