Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

Judaism - despite Freud’s non-observance as ‘a godless Jew’ (Freud and Meng 1963) his
knowledge of Judaism is more considerable than he acknowledged. 57
Defining spirituality
This is a complex, disputed, contradictory, elusive and ambiguous yet essential task as
spirituality apart from religion is a pervasive cultural phenomenon (Hull 1996; Hill et al.
2000; Carrette and King 2005; Gilligan and Furlong 2006), a consequence of social, cultural
and philosophical and psychological changes of the twentieth century. The evolution of the
‘self’ 58 , the emergence of secularization 59 , the parallel development of sacralization 60 ,
postmodern critiques of Modernity 61 and the increasing dominance of consumerism as a
57 This is a theme dealt with in various chapters in section B, but a particular focus of chapter eleven.
58 The twentieth century saw the flowering of central Modernist ideas that relocated the self as an independent
entity evolving in opposition to a reified socially structured and religiously ordered world. Human selfconsciousness
came to be located as the centre of the Universe and the source of authority, a move from the
metaphysical to the metapsychological. The primacy of individual experience has been built on in spiritual
practices advocated by the emergence of quasi-religious and spiritual ideas and movements that developed
from the 1960s onwards outside of established religions. In such new religious movements/cults, the New-
Age movement, and religious progressive organizations the self is viewed as Divine, absolutely independent
and radically inter-dependent (Heelas 1996; Bruce 2000b; Lynch 2007b).
59 A second and parallel development was that of secularization as a descriptive category of social change and
an underpinning principle in social thinking. This is another complex area that has dominated the sociology of
religion for the last 40 years (Davie 1994; Bruce 1996; Brown 2001). Every decade has seen the emergence of
new writers entering the debate and existing writers returning to the debate, either to substantiate, enlarge or
refute their earlier thinking (Martin 2005). The consensus of views on secularization was that it provided a
key tool in understanding significant change in society creating an exciting advent in sociological theory, even
if this is now seen by some as a myth (Lyon 1985: 4f.).
60 Yet alongside this there has been the emergence of sacralization as an alternative paradigm (Woodhead and
Heelas 2000; Heelas and Woodhead 2005). Secularization finds itself unable to address the generic growth of
spirituality; the persistence of ‘cults’; and the emergence of fundamentalism (Bruce 2000a; Ruthven 2004,
2007). As an overall thesis it has significant failings in addressing the social world as it is, as evidenced in
Heelas and Woodhead's recent work, rather than the world that is theorized to be within a particular academic
discipline.
61 The secular landscape is a part of the Modernist landscape and subject to the same failings of Modernity as
outlined by Giddens and others (Giddens 1991; Loewenthal and Snell 2003). In response the postmodern
perspective challenges all meta-narratives, not just religion, including secularization and psychoanalysis
(Loewenthal and Snell 2003; Elliott 2004). As a consequence the secular landscape is highly changeable
depending on where one starts from. If that starting point contains a notion of spiritual and religious
experience, ‘believing not belonging’ or the reverse ‘belonging but not believing’ there is no authority to
declaim this experience. What is clearer is evidence of a separation between formal, public religion and
private religion and spirituality. The development of spirituality as a form of private, self-focused experience
that functions like a religion is an important aspect of the wider secularization thesis (Lynch 2005).
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