Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

CHAPTER SEVEN. PATTERNS OF ENGAGEMENT –
CONFESSIONAL/CREDAL
Thirty years on it requires a purposeful stepping back into another time and culture, a re-
contextualization, in order to understand how difficult it was to challenge orthodox
psychoanalytic beliefs. Freud’s dominance was still a central part of psychoanalytic belief
and culture. The initiators of what was to become a new phase of development for religion
and spirituality in psychoanalysis were Meissner and Rizzuto, building on their commitment
to a Roman Catholic faith tradition prior to psychoanalytic training. Rizzuto and Meissner’s
critical engagement with Freud focused on: Freud’s ‘religious’ behaviours; his
correspondence with Pfister; his denial of the feminine in psychoanalysis and faith; and the
limitation of his understanding of religion and spirituality based on expressions of pathology
rather than illustrations of human growth and development. The validity of these critiques
have stood the test of time and been incorporated into most subsequent critical evaluations
of Freud. 183
The second strand to their thinking was the sharing of a symmetrical ontology that held on
the one hand an orthodox, credal religious belief (Catholicism) as the source of Truth
revealed by God and external to human selfhood. On the other hand they acknowledged
localized truth generated by psychoanalytic insight into human selfhood, as lived out
through religious and spiritual experience.
183 There is a qualitative difference in the quality of the engagement found in Meissner and Rizzuto’s work
compared to that found in Wolman’s edited text aimed at Catholic and psychoanalytic dialogue (Wolman
1976). The Roman Catholic theologian Hans Kung did produce a helpful critique of Freud, however it lacks
the psychoanalytic insights offered by Meissner and Rizzuto. It deals with Freud solely in terms of his ideas
rather than any clinical application (Kung 1979). Rempel offers a helpful critique of both Meissner and Kung
arguing that they overlook Freud’s willingness to revise his ideas, including his approach to religion (Rempel
1997).
78