Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

pertaining to grace, providence, and salvation - I can envision a new era in … the dialogue
between psychoanalysis and religion’ (Meissner 2001: 125), a theme he returns to again
in
considering the future of psychoanalysis for the twenty-first century (Meissner 2006b).
Running throughout Meissner’s work is the paradox offered by St. Ignatius, ‘Pray as though
everything depended on God, but act as though everything depended on you’ (Meissner
2001: 111). Meissner’s understanding of religious and spiritual engagement with
psychoanalysis as that of parallel systems is a clear and consistent theme adopted by other
psychoanalysts, including Grotstein.
Religion and psychoanalysis are parallel disciplines that have been examining the
same truths and realities from differing vertices. They converge in philosophy.
Religion, particularly in its spiritual dimension, is more psychoanalytic than it ever
suspected, and conversely psychoanalysis is more spiritual than it (particularly ego
psychology) has yet recognized (Grotstein 2001: 325).
Meissner’s work elicited a critical response from the psychoanalytic historian, Peter Gay.
Adopting Freud’s view that ‘every scientific investigation of religious belief has unbelief as
its presupposition’ (Gay 1987: 112) Gay responded to Meissner’s desire for a dialogue
between psychoanalysis and religion. 203 Gay, a historian of the Enlightenment and
biographer of Freud (Gay 1967, 1969, 1988) produced A Godless Jew (Gay 1987) 204 to
resolve questions about Freud’s atheism, and the religious and Jewish nature of
psychoanalysis. Freud was part of a scientific Enlightenment tradition where his
202 Reflecting on his career as an analyst Meissner writes, ‘I … do my best as an analyst, and believing as I do
in God and his grace, leaving those effects and the patient’s responsiveness to grace between that patient and
his God … Religious questions and feelings in this context come up, but only when the patient brings them up.
My responses are calculated to be exploratory of the patient’s beliefs and religious attitudes, and I try - with
some exceptions … almost never to introduce my own religious views … I have … at times quoted religious
elements … but the focus and purpose has been, I hope and trust, always analytic’ (Meissner 2001: 111).
203 ‘The most ingenious scholarship or most embracing pacifism could not, and should not, erase the enmity
between science and theology, psychoanalysis and religion’ (Gay 1987: 112).
204 This term was used by Freud of himself in a letter to Pfister 9/10/1918 (Freud and Meng 1963: 63).
202
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