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I first encountered the writings of Gargiulo when I was researching psychoanalytic education for my master's thesis, and read his honest and
courageous paper on his psychoanalytic training, entitled “Finding an Ear: Reflections on a Psychoanalytic Journey.” He referred to his training as a “psychoanalytic pilgrimage,” demonstrating the influence that Roman Catholicism—including ten years in a monastic order—had on him. That paper could be seen as a kind of confession, in the Christian and the autobiographical sense of the word. Like other great self-revealers including Freud, Gargiulo sees dignified candour to be the sine qua non of any useful discussion about psychoanalysis.
So it is clear that the residue of a quest that began when Gargiulo was an observing Catholic is found in his mission to rehabilitate religion within psychoanalysis. Gargiulo would object to my use of the word religion. In this collection of previously published essays—which, following Joyce MacDougall, could be called Plea for a Measure of Spirituality—Gargiulo insists that he is discussing spirituality in general, and not any particular organized faith. Understandably sensitive to the demands for dogmatic allegiance that a faith community can exert, he is dismayed by the least appearance of doctrinal rigidity in the psychoanalytic world. Gargiulo's way of preventing any conflict in a consideration of spirituality and psychoanalysis is to maintain a loose framework that defines spirituality as the sense of “everyday transcendence” and refrains from any reference to a particular faith or creed.
In a sense, Gargiulo's non-parochial approach to his readers is the same approach analysts and analytic therapists have to take to their patients. Whether we share a religious or cultural background with our patients, or are completely unfamiliar with what they bring, we must still attempt to find a respectful posture in relation to them without getting too deeply mired in the particulars of any faith. B