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Inspired by their work with patients wrestling with spiritual crises, Lucia Fattori and Cesare Secchi have written a most interesting paper rooted in the boundaries between analyst and patient, self and other, body and mind, formed and formless, psychology and religiosity. They take on the challenge of writing about faith in a psychological context without reducing it to a scientific category, simultaneously locating the patients' experience within the analytic
frame and allowing the material to work on them from within the mysterious realm of soul. In this way, they avoid collapsing unfathomable spiritual experience into a more delimited conceptual system. It is their capacity to observe from the spaces between polarities that brings to their work the potential awe embedded within conflicting paradoxical positions.
The paper opens with a description of the case of a 28-year-old Catholic priest whose life to that point appears to have been unduly influenced by his wish to fulfill the ideals of a religious mother who sent him to seminary when he was 11. The patient was deprived of many normative adolescent experiences and by all appearances moved into a pseudo-identification with his priestly vocation. He served under a shadowy, philandering senior priest whose behaviour engendered a violent and overwhelming internal upheaval that was followed by a psychotic break during which he ran naked through the church, speaking to and masturbating in front of a crucifix. The patient subsequently described the experience as the breakthrough of ‘a moment of truth’ that brought him close to God and for the first time gave him access to a genuine feeling for his calling to the clergy. After a brief hospitalization, he had a few sessions of psychoanalysis which provide the basis for this report.
A second case involves a 38-year-old male composer whose lengthy analysis was coming to an end. With the termination date in sight, the patient, who had a lifelong involvement with the Chur