Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

and faith (Schneiders 2000; Hull 2002) because there are still significant numbers of people
who embrace religious and spiritual beliefs and activities (Orsi 2004).
4. The idea that religion is a historic movement dominated by a Judeao-Christian tradition as
found in a Western European context. This secularized view does not deny the presence of
religion, but sees it as privatized, with little public value (Brown 2001; Luckmann 2003).
The term spirituality equates to privatized forms of religion. 63
5. Religion and spirituality are used interchangeably, with no consensus of meaning, each
use being determined by the context: therefore spirituality is socially constructed with no
universal commonality of meaning (Pattison 2001). Consequently some psychoanalytic
writers prefer the term religion as this is a known entity (Black 2006). 64
6. The demise of religion has left an ethical and values-based vacuum in society that early
Modernist movements, such as Marxism, and late Modernist influences, such as
consumerism, cannot satisfy. The alienation experienced within contemporary culture
leaves unfilled vital aspects of the person most often related to health and wholeness and
finds expression in the terms ‘spirituality’ and ‘soul’. 65
63 This is challenged by a range of thinkers, including Besecke (Besecke 2005).
64 Worthington and Sandage offer a review of the empirical research on religion and spirituality and identify a
potential mismatch between the understandings held by the client and the therapist. More clients assume
spirituality within a religious framework, while more therapists assume a spirituality apart from religion
(Worthington and Sandage 2001).
65 An example of this is the huge interest in spirituality found in the nursing profession and evidenced in a
considerable level of current research. A critique of this development however could add that as nursing has
evolved into a professional profession, rather than just a caring profession, it has claimed the holistic aspect of
the patient as an area of particular expertise, so the drive to establish spirituality as a specifically nursing remit
fuels other more pragmatic ends (Gilliat-Ray 2003).
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