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We came to examining the spiritual dimension of psychoanalysis from two directions. Since the reader is likely to locate themself somewhere in-between the two of us, we thought including our two separate accounts might provide an orienting map for the issue.
I grew up culturally Jewish in an atheist household. I remember reading a children’s version of the Bible for its stories alongside Grimm’s Fairy Tales. I knew even then that institutional religion was for non-enlightened people willing to believe these childish stories into adulthood. And yet I remained drawn to those men and women who fought lions and saw burning bushes and wrestled with angels. The feelings were real, even if the incidents were not. I remember checking out a temple with my first wife after the birth of our first child, both of us longing at that moment for some contact with our ancestors. We pushed through the heavy doors, listened to the Hebrew prayers, watched the people davening - and then rushed back out into the anonymous street-life. The temple would always be taboo for me. I think I came to psychoanalysis as a kind of compromise. Here was a secular project that gave pride of place to the invisible. What my patients and I come up with together has no existence in the brain nor in the world, but comes into being only between minds. Whether we think of this “something” as a narrative or as an emergent property of an intersubjective exchange, one thing we can be certain of is that it is immaterial. It may not be spiritual, but it is spiritual-adjacent.
I grew up in a household steeped in eastern mysticism. My parents were seekers who believed that God is what’s deepest within us. Versions of this intimate nondual divine populate mysticisms throughout the world’s religious traditions, and I grew up feeling connected to a mystical core that I saw as cutting across divisions. Although my spirituality bent inward and resisted capture in terms of doctrines and in