Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

ecame Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Tufts Medical School, where she ran a year-long
seminar on pastoral care for pastors located in South Boston, as well as becoming a training
and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East (PINE). 214
Rizzuto received the 1996 William C. Bier Award of the American Psychological
Association and the 1997 Pfister Award of the American Psychiatric Association for her
contributions to the study of religion. Rizzuto continues to be active and highly regarded in
the wider psychoanalytic world, the Roman Catholic faith tradition, and the psychology of
religion, through training, teaching, lecturing, publication and personal contacts (Rizzuto
2005).
Rizzuto’s Birth of the Living God was: ‘an original contribution to psychoanalysis’
(McDargh 1983: 146); ‘groundbreaking’ (Bingaman 2003a: 75; Sorenson 1994: 636);
‘pioneering’ (Palmer 1997: 73); a new research paradigm (McDargh 1997: 181) and adding
to ‘revisionist psychoanalysis’ (Jonte-Pace in Bingaman 2003a: x). It provided a brilliant
summary and a detailed critique of Freud’s understanding of religion, 215 Rizzuto locating
suffered from that prejudice, as I was nearly turned down from seeking analytic training because of it. When,
after apparently a fair amount of debate about this I was finally accepted, friends advised me to go to Semrad
for a training analysis; he was a practising Catholic and highly regarded clinician. He was very respectful of
my religious choices and did not immediately assume these were neurotically based. As we know, other of the
earlier assumptions in our field, as, for example, some of our views on female sexuality or sexual preference,
have been seen in retrospect to have arisen out of societal prejudices—lifted in keeping with shifting cultural
awareness and values—rather than based on science or observation (though, of course, science and observation
themselves are culturally influenced)’ (Schwaber 2002: 71f.).
By contrast another long-standing psychoanalytic colleague of Semrad’s added ‘Personally, I never
thought of him as particularly "spiritual." Though he was known as a conventional Roman Catholic, in
keeping with his Czech immigrant background, he made occasional jokes at the expense of the church’
(Gifford 2010).
214 PINE emerged from within the Boston Psychoanalytic Society as a separate training institute in 1974. ‘The
BPSI-PINE result was finally positive for both institutes and brought about a greater pluralism in the Boston
area’ (Kirsner 2000: 89). Meissner remained in the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and while Rizzuto was part
of PINE, she remained in contact and they collaborated on a number of projects.
215 ‘The theoretical section is a must for any student of classical psychoanalysis’ (Beit-Hallahmi 1996: 153).
Previous attempts are found in Psychoanalysis and religion (Fromm 1950), Freud and religion (Zilboorg
1958), Psychoanalysis and religion (Zilboorg 1962).
89