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This past June, I had the good fortune to be involved in a weekend retreat and conference on spirituality and psychoanalysis at Mt. Ranier. This meeting, organized by the Northwest Center for Psychoanalysis, was a pioneering effort to encourage serious reflection on the relationship between discourses on subjects that normally proceed in two unrelated (and sometimes antagonistic) universes. Assuming that this state of affairs hurts psychoanalysis, the planning committee invited psychoanalysts from different religious backgrounds to present their ideas. I am very pleased to have been included in this event, which evidently was enormously satisfying for everyone who attended.
Dixie Noble, PhD, a Native American psychoanalyst from Los Angeles, asserted that a keen respect for symbolism is intrinsic to the spiritual tradition of the Native American peoples. She and her colleague Curtis Kekahbah described rituals such as mask-making and the sweat-lodge ceremony. According to Dr. Noble, the healing that comes from participation in such activities resembles the healing that psychoanalysis offers because both religious ritual and psychoanalytic process promote a sense of unity and integration. Religious ritual promotes a sense of unity with respect to the cosmos, while psychoanalysis promotes unity of and within the psyche.
Beverly Gorsuch, MRE, MSW, a graduate of Yale Divinity School and one of the founders of the Northwest Center for Psychoanalysis, described Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Catherine of Sienna, Yogananda, Ghandi, and Mother Teresa as “spiritual giants … [who] rattle our cages.” She said they “validate and radically expand our psychoanalytic views of human capacity…. They go heroically deeper into the very processes all humans use.” She originally went into psychoanalysis for help with pain, but, finding limited relief from psychoanalysis, she renewed and extended her religious commitment-without abandoning psychoanalysis.
Tibetan Buddhism, according to Lobsang Rapgay,