Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

psychoanalysis 187 Meissner articulated ‘areas of problematic divergence’ and provided an
‘over-all matrix’ within which psychoanalysis and religion co-exist. (Meissner 1978a: 114).
He returns to these themes in Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience (1984) engaging a
much wider audience, 188 where he offers: an exposition and critique of Freud’s
understanding of religion; a psychoanalytic developmental view of religious experience; an
examination of the illusory and transitional nature of religious experience; and a theological
critique of human nature and personal freedom. 189 ‘If the dialectic between religion and
psychoanalysis is to have any meaning at all, we cannot afford to retreat from that vital and
sensitive frontier’ (Meissner 1984a: viii). 190 Meissner identifies external forms of religious
activity alongside private devotion and mystical aspects that are difficult to define 191 but
which are also suitable subjects for analysis. 192 Theology is enriched if it is able to move to
a more sophisticated anthropology utilizing psychoanalytic insights, 193 balancing a
187 ‘Psychoanalysis is necessarily iconoclastic, regardless of the faith or non-faith of the psychoanalyst ...
Psychoanalysis as such cannot go beyond the necessity of iconoclasm. This necessity is open to a double
possibility, that of faith and that of non-faith, but the decision about these two possibilities does not rest with
psychoanalysis’ (Ricoeur quoted in Meissner 1978a: 114).
188 There would always be a limited readership of a psychoanalytic journal where Meissner’s previous work on
religious experience had been published.
189 Though published as one book, the uneven four-part nature of the structure reveals that these were written
for different audiences and at different times.
190 The term ‘dialectic’, which runs through all Meissner’s work (1976-2003), was first used discussing
Schafer and internalization (Schafer 1972). Meissner recognizes Schafer’s ‘dialectical antithesis to prevailing
psychoanalytic views’ (Meissner 1976a: 374) and uses this to examine how outer and inner worlds relate
through metaphor, as Schafer suggests, or as a process involving self-objects and self-representations as
Meissner suggests. As religious experience brings together outer and inner worlds, Meissner offers religion
and psychoanalysis a strategy of engaging in dialectic discourse, where each discipline poses critical insight
into the other without confusing or conflating the two into a merged synthesis of which distinctiveness is a
casualty.
191 ‘We are left with a subject that is extremely complex, ephemeral, difficult to elicit and to study, and yet of
the most profound significance to man's existential reality’ (Meissner 1984a: 8).
192 ‘It was Freud who originally pointed out that the believer’s attitude toward God may contain resonances
and residues of earlier attitudes toward parental figures’ (Meissner 1984a: 11).
193 ‘Contemporary theological reflection, however, is considerably more self-conscious and inclined to include
reflection on one's subjective experience among the creative roots of theology ... the psychoanalytic
psychology of religious experience becomes a basic science to which theological reflection must turn in order
81