Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

psychotherapist with important connections to the psychoanalytic community, 135 Spero’s
work sets out to integrate object relations theories, Judaism and psychoanalysis through a
specific Halakhic metapsychology combining internal and external representations of God.
This work will be examined later in chapter nine, but the 1990s saw a growing interest in
Jewish identity and psychoanalytic dialogue.
The uniqueness of the New York State accreditation of psychoanalytic training fostered
training groups that embraced new developments in psychoanalysis and culture. Two key
areas that proved to be of great significance were the relational and intersubjective
perspectives (Benjamin 1988, 1990; Mitchell 1988), as well as a growing interest in
Buddhism (Epstein 1990/1998, 1995; Rubin 1991, 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997). These
developments took place outside the orthodox psychoanalytic societies that controlled
access to the International Psychoanalytical Association and wider psychoanalytic
acknowledgment. They contributed to the pluralism that characterized psychoanalysis from
the late 1980s and still shapes it today (Wallerstein 1988, 1992; Cooper 2006).
These brief historical accounts reveal the differing psychoanalytic contexts of the UK and
the USA, and how these influenced the identity of religious and spiritual emergence in
contemporary psychoanalysis. These engagements drew on theoretical developments
located in the work of Winnicott and Bion, which will now be explored in chapter six.
135 Spero names the psychoanalytic communities in Michigan and Cleveland ‘within which I have found so
many important teachers’ (Spero 1992: xi).
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