Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

and to others, and ultimately to Other (Klotz 2006) Other (small o) is defined as ‘someone
recognisable or as someone more or less equal to oneself’ and ‘as the Symbolic field in
which every person is constituted as a speaking subject with desire’. Other (capital O) ‘is an
order that is situated beyond the subject but which nevertheless allows for the possibility of
a social bond or a relationship with the other. The Other is the locus of language that is
necessary to provide the message with its articulated meaning’ Eigen whilst
acknowledging that Lacan claims to be anti-mystical utilizes the concepts of the symbolic,
jouissance, and the other/Other in his a unique synthesis that sees these concepts emerge in
the intersubjective space created. 582
Thirdly, Donald Winnicott. 583 Winnicott as a pioneering paediatrician and psychoanalyst
focused much of his working and thinking on the early phases of the mother/infant dyad.
He saw the psychoanalytic process reflecting the same early stages of this dyad, which he
explored theoretically in a number of highly original clinical papers, though he never sought
to establish a systematic theory, like Lacan or his clinical supervisor and colleague Melanie
Klein. Winnicott used language in a poetic and paradoxical way that allows space in-andthrough
which meaning is generated. Eigen sees in Winnicott a focus on ‘alivenessdeadness
- what conditions enliven-deaden self’ so that ‘His work resonates with a sense of
the sacred. He wrote of a sacred core of personality, the incommunicado self … Winnicott
did not need an other world mysticism … For Winnicott, the emptying – opening let
something real happen. Emptiness – openness was a method for courting spontaneity. Thus
the real was not entirely or simply the three-dimensional material world, the matter how
important the latter. The real was associated with playing, chaos, destruction and surviving
destruction, madness’ (1998: 15). Eigen adds ‘religion in this sense of ties between (neither
here nor there, here – and there – and – between) becomes the defining ingredient of the
real. The realness of living becomes a value in its own right’ (1998: 16). Winnicott as read
by Eigen developed a sense of the sacred through aliveness and in encountering the true self
in the real world, almost at a sacramental level.
Fourthly, Wilfred Bion. 584 Bion was a highly decorated but traumatized officer in the First
World War, who in 1918 went on to study history, philosophy, literature and art. He
subsequently trained as a doctor, then a psychiatrist based at the Tavistock Clinic in the
1930s, when he began his training as a psychoanalyst with Rickman, interrupted by the
Second World War, but continued with Klein from 1945. His work at the Northfield
Military Hospital, Birmingham led to pioneering work of groups and group dynamics still
used today (Harrison 2000). Bion sought to develop his psychoanalytic ideas through
mathematical and philosophical concepts and equations and his subsequent work divided
opinions. On one hand these have been described as ‘elaborate, turgid, often paradoxical
and incredibly abstract notions. They emerge … as a jumble of grandiosely-conceived,
over-intellectualised and misguided efforts at achieving an impossible, even undesirable
goal’ (Esman 1995: 429). On the other ‘His ideas have spread beyond the ghetto of his
Kleinian roots to every major school within the psychoanalytic framework … he was one of
582
Bion developed a different concept of O that is open to several meanings including the mystical (Grotstein
2000, 2007).
583
Biographical details can be found in (Kahr 1996) and (Rodman 2003).
584
Biographical details can be found in (Bleandonu 1994).
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