Epilogue: How the Sacred Emerges Clinically: Transcendent Moments in Psychoanalysis

Abstract

One of the ideas animating this issue for us was that spiritual elements of experience have tended to go under-examined within psychoanalytic theory and practice. We wanted this issue to foreground spiritual dimensions, “transcendent moments” in psychoanalysis, drawing on a diverse set of psychoanalytic theories, religious traditions, and notions of the spiritual. After immersing ourselves in this rich set of papers, we’re struck, yes, by the diversity of ways of conceptualizing the spiritual and experiencing its movement clinically; but also by the ways in which these papers often locate the transcendent as a central rather than a peripheral element of psychoanalytic practice, although one that often goes unnamed. In other words, this project of foregrounding the spiritual seems to be less about exploring rare and discrete emergences of the sacred seen as important but peripheral to core analytic work – and rather about a focus on spiritual dimensions as providing us new ways of talking about some of the deeper and more meaningful parts of the work for both patients and analysts. We see this, for instance, in Goldin’s notion of the frame as sacred space; Kulka’s interpretation of Self Psychology as involving at its center the self’s spiritual evolution; Barrie-Anthony’s model of contemporary spiritualities as the sacralization of intimate intersubjective experience; Shane’s tender account of coming recently to listen for patients’ spiritual experience and the clinical and personal expansiveness that’s ensued; Summers’ characterization of immersing oneself in the patient’s experience as a spiritual way of relating that “constitutes the uniquely analytic way of being”; Atlas’s view of a spiritual process in the ability to mourn; Sucharov’s use of complexity theory to define a “spiritual psychoanalytic practice”; Black’s hopeful elevation of psychoanalysis as a forum through which to allow us to speak again of “love of being” and a “transcendent” level of ethics; Allan’s lyrical meditation on the spiritual as a transformation into a broader field of experience; and Eigen’s exploration of spiritual “specs,” moments that move into depth: “One does not have to swallow any account or tradition wholesale,” Eigen writes, “in order to be receptive to moments and phrases that touch and add.” In all there is a quality of manyness in this issue in terms of traditions and theories, but there is also, it strikes us, a strong consensus among the authors that attending to spirituality (however we gloss it, whatever the names and sources) is not to dance on the surfaces or peripheries of psychoanalytic work, but to dive more deeply within it.