Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

engagement see little relevance for Freud’s later more speculative writings, viewing only his
central theories as those essential for the clinical task (Perelberg 2005a), and claim ‘Like its
founder most psychoanalysts are not religious’ (Budd and Rusbridger 2005: 2). By contrast
psychoanalysts adopting relational or intersubjective perspectives see issues of religion and
spirituality playing an important role (Eagle 1984; Rubin 1998, 2004; Eigen 2001b, 2004;
Rabate 2003). Psychoanalysis then is an evolving term that cannot be captured by one
specific definition but an important reflexive question remains ‘How do I define
contemporary psychoanalysis?’
Psychoanalysis is not a definitive body of knowledge that attains the status of truth as Freud
hoped. 54 Yet its central concepts and practices are truth-and-meaning-bearing and this
enables a truer knowledge to be discerned and experienced. Neither is psychoanalysis
simply functional, focused on particular aspects of training and practice. It is rather a
relational encounter between two people, one of whom has been trained to examine the
unconscious, theirs and others, adhering to a body of knowledge originating in Freud and
accommodating contemporary understandings of the self in relation to self, community,
culture and the Other. This two-person relationship generates an intersubjective ‘space’,
consciously and unconsciously peopled by internal objects/inner presences, where one can
rediscover the narratives of the human spirit/soul. This psychoanalytic ‘space’ has the
potential to facilitate or create transcendent encounter that finds parallels in the language
and experience of mysticism, but is not mysticism. Such encounter points beyond the self
while being experienced within the self. The key tool in this process is the free association
of ideas, feelings, memories, and events that can be inhibited by dominant discourses and
54 Phillips recognizes that there are ‘those of us who do not want the sadomasochistic fantasy of truth in
scientific psychoanalysis - truth, that is, as something to which we are obliged to submit’ (Phillips 1993: xvi).
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