Prologue

Both domains—psychoanalysis and religion—hold deeply the desire to transform human misery, each having unique perspectives and protocols for achieving that end. At first considered supreme enemies, religion, in the formal sense, and spirituality, in the experiential, were viewed by psychoanalysis at best with suspicion, and at worst with contempt. With the shift away from modernism, however, many psychoanalysts have new found appreciation for the ancient way of spirituality, and its academic counterpart in theology. We wish to foster this burgeoning dialogue in this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry.

This issue is dedicated to the late Randall Lehmann Sorenson, who, before his untimely and tragic death in 2005, was creating space to think of psychoanalysis and religion as complementary. Dr. Sorenson held graduate degrees in religion, clinical psychology, and psychoanalysis. In 2004 his critically acclaimed book, Minding Spirituality: Perspectives From Relational Psychoanalysis, was published by The Analytic Press.

In Minding Spirituality Sorenson invited us to “take an interest in our patients' spirituality that is respectful but not reductionistic, welcoming but not indoctrinating” (2004, p. 1). Spirituality holds profound possibilities for transformation and needs to be acknowledged, according to Sorenson (2004) “in the threefold sense of legitimately being bothered by it, attending to it, and even exercising stewardship or husbandry over it” (pp. 1-2).

The authors in this issue identify with Sorenson's clarion call to be bothered by spirituality by attending or paying attention to it. They have retired the outdated practice of hermetically sealing off psychoanalysis and spirituality from one another and they reject reductionistic tendencies to shrink all of spiritual experience to “nothing but” psychological constructs or pathology. Yet, they also decline to meld the two together in a manner that ignores differences and disparities. Instead, each author attempts to en