Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

apprehending the Wholly Other (Corbett 2007). 70 Jung in turn influenced Eliade (Cox
2006), a pioneering historian of religion who promoted a universal concept of religion
where the basic orientation of being human is to the sacred, in contrast to the profane
(Eliade 1957). 71
Lynch, while acknowledging the importance of Eliade’s and Otto’s ideas as theological
projects, rejects the application of these concepts to social and cultural engagement as they
are based on: a universalization of the sacred; a ‘binary opposition … between the sacred
and the profane’ (Lynch 2007a: 135) 72 ; an inability to address competing notions of the
sacred; and their focus on the sacred as an internalized private encounter. ‘The sacred is
encountered in and through culture, not in some privatized, mystical space that is separate
from it’ (Lynch 2007a: 137) including psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis offers an object-
relational world that holds together the inner private world with engagement in a wider
personal world – one coheres with, rather than dichotomizes the other. 73 This is implicit in
Lynch’s definition of the sacred.
The sacred is an object defined by a particular quality of human thought, feeling and
behaviour, in which it is regarded as a grounding or ultimate source of power,
identity, meaning and truth. This quality of human attention to the sacred object is
constructed and mediated through particular social relations, and cultural practices
and resources. Religions are social and cultural systems which are orientated
towards sacred objects (Lynch 2007a: 138).
70
A helpful discussion of Jung’s ideas on the ego, self, imago Dei, Divinity and the numinosum can be found
in Stein (Stein 2008).
71
These ideas are taken up and developed further by another influential philosopher of religion, Ninian Smart
(Smart 1996). A critical discussion of the nature of the sacred in Eliade is found in Studstill (Studstill 2000).
72
A similar critique is offered by Jones (Jones 2002a).
73
Jones draws on the work of Kohut to describe a psychoanalytic process. ‘These dualistic definitions of
sacredness should be complemented by theorizing which stresses the continuity between the psychological
processes underlying religion and those common in other human domains as well as between objects denoted
as sacred and other objects’ (Jones 2002a: 61).
38