Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

more like stray notes than a central motif’ (Rubin 2006: 132) suggesting that this is still an
important area of investigation. The complexities around defining psychoanalysis apply
equally to religion and spirituality, yet the following working definitions are adopted to
capture these vital areas of human thought, experience and being.
Defining religion
Religion can be understood in devotional, theistic/theological, sociological/cultural,
historical, cognitive, phenomenological and functional ways (Ross 1999; Lynch 2005).
This is a complex theoretical debate that has dominated the history of religions (Orsi 2004),
and the psychology of religion (Wulff 1997) but those detailed discussions lie beyond this
research (Lynch 2007a). Religion at its simplest and most inclusive is ‘the story of the
human encounter with the Sacred - a universal phenomenon made evident in myriad ways’
(Eliade 1987: xi) which in a Western tradition draws primarily from Christian and Jewish
theistic traditions emphasizing belief in a supreme Being. 56 King develops this by
identifying eight aspects of a religion as: traditionalism; religious experience (psychological
experience in a religious context or frame); myth and symbol; concepts of salvation; sacred
places and objects; sacred actions or rituals; sacred writings; and sacred community (King
1987: 282f.). Functional, descriptive and inclusive approaches to religion are adopted in
this research as they establish common ground for engagement with spirituality and
psychoanalysis. Historically, psychoanalysis engaged with theistic religions, in Freud’s
case primarily Roman Catholicism (rather than with Pfister’s liberal Protestantism), and
56 Bergin and Richards’ important summary of research on religion and spirituality in relation to counselling
and psychotherapy based primarily in a North American context defines religion as ‘theistic beliefs, practices,
and feelings that are often, but not always, expressed institutionally and denominationally as well as
personally’ (Bergin and Richards 1997: 13).
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