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One of Bani Shorter's aims in this deeply-felt book is to find, or to create, a language in which analytical psychologists can talk about religious experience. For her that means the experience of the ego encountering the non-ego of the psyche—which she calls ‘the sacred’—through the transformative medium of symbol. Any form which facilitates this encounter and involves initiation into another way of being, she calls ritual. Our ability to access and understand our own symbols, within ritual, means we are all ‘susceptible to the sacred’. Analysis, like religion, is ‘an attempt to eliminate resistance to the psycho-sacred process’ (pp. 39ff) by providing ritual containment for the arising symbols. She believes that whenever we work therapeutically, we inescapably work religiously.
This non-ego part of the psyche Shorter calls variously: the unknown and unexpressed personified (a natural psychic process) as god, the creator of our being perceived as an archetypal image within the soul, a supraordinate force, the fundamental pattern in us, the divine, the inner world, the irrational, the imaginary, spirit, the unconscious, the self. All these are ‘sacred’. Shorter thus sets an elevated tone, where affect is more important than definition. This contrasts with Anthony Storr, who, in Feet of Clay, describes mystical experiences in cool, readily comprehensible language—because for him these aspects of our psyche are not ‘sacred’.
But for Shorter this is an encounter with the living god, and not a commonplace event easily described. It is a particular kind of human experience, defined both by its quality and its object. Her language reaches—sometimes strains—towards the ‘sacred’, which is ‘other’ to ego, consciousness, the rational, the profane, the human, the world. Like the ego, however, it is also ‘I’, part of my own self. Yet there is a division—or differentiation between man and god: ‘I meet and am met, challenged and blessed by contact with a wondrous, enigmatic and div