Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

his career Loewald expressed his regret that he had not explored religion further: however,
he discussed this with a psychoanalytic colleague resulting in an important multi-
disciplinary text Psychoanalysis and Religion (Smith and Handelman 1990) 128 whose
contributors,
declare, explicitly or implicitly, that unless a thinker can conceive of God as real or,
at a minimum, conceive that another can nondefensively conceive of God as real, he
or she is significantly barred from understanding religious texts or religious belief.
Psychoanalysts, by and large, are to be counted on the positive or negative side of
this minimum provision (Smith and Handelman 1990: xi).
Loewald was the first psychoanalytic supervisor of Stanley Leavy. Maintaining a Christian
faith with his analytic thinking, Leavy drew on Romantic literature, Loewald, Lacan, Buber
and Ricoeur to offer a hermeneutic of interpretative dialogue that valued religious beliefs,
described by Meissner as ‘eloquent and profoundly meaningful’ (Leavy 1988). 129 Leavy
offered a different theological perspective to those adopted by Meissner and Rizzuto, where
Leavy sees psychoanalysis becoming a new form of revealing, that enhances the creative
actions of God in each person. Leavy was one of the few psychoanalysts engaging with
religion that recognized its vital community dimension, taking it outside the internal
psychoanalytic realm or limits of religious experience. Religion becomes ‘the recognition
by a community of a real being or beings transcending sense experience, with whom the
members of the community exist in a mutual relationship’ (Smith and Handelman 1990: xi).
Another was James Jones an Episcopal priest, philosopher of religion, clinical psychologist
and psychoanalytic practitioner. He utilizes Winnicott, Stern, Kohut, Meissner, Rizzuto,
Loewald and Leavy’s ideas bringing them into dialogue with Otto, Tillich, Buber and Bollas
on the subject of the sacred. Jones’ creativity and desire for dialogue offered a theological
128 This included contributions from Meissner and Leavy. Loewald and Meissner had previously co-written a
report on metapsychology, but this makes no reference to religion (Loewald and Meissner 1976).
129 These ideas combined to became In the image of God: A psychoanalyst’s view (Leavy 1988).
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