Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

The trickle of interest in religion and spirituality had by the early 2000s become a steady
stream of articles, books and conferences hosted by psychoanalytic organisations - an
unthinkable development even a decade before. Black’s influential presence in British
psychoanalysis developed further when in 2001 he was asked to edit a book on
psychoanalysis and religion and the BP-AS ran a conference Psychoanalysis and Religion in
the 21 st Century: Competitors or Collaborators in 2003. The keynote speakers’ texts
(Black, Blass, Britton, Epstein and Parsons) formed the basis of Black’s book of the same
title. A unique aspect was Black’s ability to gather together distinguished analytic
contributors from around the world, offering the most comprehensive engagement between
religion, spirituality and psychoanalysis to date. 113 Yet British psychoanalysis has not
apparently changed as a result. Black continues to run seminars on psychoanalysis, religion
and spirituality, although they are not generally well attended by his psychoanalytic
colleagues (personal communication Black). 114
Reflections by British analysts on training in the 1950s and 1960s reveals a significant
dynamic dominating British psychoanalysis. They reveal a world of simmering tensions,
rivalries, pressures to conform and strong personalities located within a small
geographically based society. In this context issues of religion and spirituality were
inconsequential. As a Society the so-called controversial discussions ‘cast a very long
shadow … after major trauma it takes three generations for a culture to fully recover’ where
the difficulty of ‘sustaining a real interchange between the different viewpoints … has come
at a cost’ (Parsons 2009: 245). If there is little dialogue over the philosophical foundations,
113 Two other texts challenging for this status include Psychoanalysis and Religion (Smith and Handelman
1990) and Soul on the Couch (Spezzano and Gargiulo 1997).
114 A seminar series run by the British Psycho-Analytic Society in the Spring of 2008.
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