Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

developing an identity as ‘it is very important to consider how the atmosphere of
psychoanalytic training and the organisation of a psychoanalytical society could foster it or
diminish it’ (Klauber 1986), 99 as in Issroff’s account. ‘I attended all seminars - Kleinian,
Anna Freudian … The then prevailing psychoanalytic ethos was generally a conformity-
demanding atheism and anti-religious attitude’ (Issroff 1999: 101). 100 Symington
acknowledges his debt to Klauber and from 1980 explored psychoanalytic and religious
themes (Symington 2004a, 2007), encouraged by Coltart, Wittenberg, and Black. 101 Two
colleagues of Klauber’s, Nina Coltart and Margaret Arden, also addressed religious issues.
Coltart offered a holistic vision for psychoanalysis. 102 She went beyond the limits of
clinical encounter and integrated Buddhist values within her person (Coltart 1986; Arden
1998). 103 Coltart elaborated her connections between psychoanalysis and Buddhism,
finding Winnicott’s true and false self concepts as an analytic equivalent of Buddhist
teaching, leading through illusion of a self to a no-self position. She identified the illusions
and hindrances encountered on the path to development through sustained attention by
meditation and contemplation, Buddhist and psychoanalytic. It is this reflective process, a
middle way, that gives meaning and depth to life and death (Coltart 1993b, 1993c, 1996;
Suspicious of external religion, Klauber saw the importance of analysts developing an inner light (a Quaker
term), resonating with spiritual experience (Symington 2007).
99 Klauber encouraged individual analysts to find their identity, despite the pressures to conform. Klauber
himself adopted techniques from another psychoanalytic non-conformist, Ferenczi (Symington 1986).
100 This was in the late 1960s when Klauber was part of the Independent group.
101 A longer list of people who supported Symington can be found in Emotion and Spirit (Symington 1994:
xvf.). Wittenberg offered ‘information on Judaism but more particularly for participating in many discussions
about the relation between psychoanalysis and religion and for her conviction that psychoanalysis lacked a
dimension which only religion could provide’ (Symington 1994: xv).
102 Regarded as ‘one of the great training analysts, supervisors, teachers, and administrators at the Institute of
Psycho-Analysis from the early 1970s through the mid-1990s’ (Bollas in Foreword Coltart 1996: xvii)
103 Coltart qualified as an analyst in 1964. From the early 1980s Coltart engaged in religious and
psychoanalytic discussion through her influential paper Slouching towards Bethlehem (Coltart 1986). Like
Symington, she gave public lectures at the Tavistock Clinic. ‘Sin and the Super-Ego’ drew insights from
Christian theology and psychoanalysis on the common goal of alleviating human suffering and the offer of
hope (Coltart 1993c).
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