Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

vision for psychoanalysis and he forged links to Mitchell and other key figures in New York
(Jones 1991).
Leavy’s analytic training was at the conservative New York Psychoanalytic Institute, which
exercised power through a defining of orthodoxy and expulsion of non-conformists. 130 New
York was often the first port of call for psychoanalysts arriving from Europe during the
1930s. Theodore Reik, emigrated from Germany in the late 1930s but found it impossible
to gain a psychoanalytic position and was refused membership of the New York
Psychoanalytic Institute. 131 He founded a group advocating training for non-medical
analysts, which evolved into the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis
(NPAP) which avoided the hegemony of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute by
becoming a New York State approved training institute. Such institutes offered a more
integrative stance towards psychoanalytic training and practice. This was to become
essential for the development of relational and intersubjective approaches in contemporary
psychoanalysis and encouraged a greater openness to engage with religion and spirituality.
The key exponent of religious and spiritual practices allied to psychoanalysis was Michael
Eigen. Influenced initially by Fromm and Buber, he explored ‘areas of faith’ in the work of
Winnicott, Lacan and Bion (Eigen 1981a) revealing an eclectic combination of the mystical,
Bion’s O, Lacan’s Imaginary and Symbolic, and object-relational theories utilizing
130 ‘One analyst recalled complaining to his training analyst that he was treating Freud like the Bible. The
training analyst replied “It is not like the Bible. It is the Bible.”’ (Kirsner 2000: 28).
131 Reik was an early follower of Freud in Vienna, who contributed one of the earliest critiques of religion in
psychoanalysis (Reik 1921) which was part of a life-long interest. He did not have a medical training that had
been established as a requirement for psychoanalytic training in the APsaA in the late 1920s.
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