Epilogue: How the Sacred Emerges Clinically: Transcendent Moments in Psychoanalysis

One of the ideas animating this issue for us was that spiritual elements of experience have tended to go under-examined within psychoanalytic theory and practice. We wanted this issue to foreground spiritual dimensions, “transcendent moments” in psychoanalysis, drawing on a diverse set of psychoanalytic theories, religious traditions, and notions of the spiritual. After immersing ourselves in this rich set of papers, we’re struck, yes, by the diversity of ways of conceptualizing the spiritual and experiencing its movement clinically; but also by the ways in which these papers often locate the transcendent as a central rather than a peripheral element of psychoanalytic practice, although one that often goes unnamed. In other words, this project of foregrounding the spiritual seems to be less about exploring rare and discrete emergences of the sacred seen as important but peripheral to core analytic work - and rather about a focus on spiritual dimensions as providing us new ways of talking about some of the deeper and more meaningful parts of the work for both patients and analysts.

We see this, for instance, in Goldin’s notion of the frame as sacred space; Kulka’s interpretation of Self Psychology as involving at its center the self’s spiritual evolution; Barrie-Anthony’s model of contemporary spiritualities as the sacralization of intimate intersubjective experience; Shane’s tender account of coming recently to listen for patients’ spiritual experience and the clinical and personal expansiveness that’s ensued; Summers’ characterization of immersing oneself in the patient’s experience as a spiritual way of relating that “constitutes the uniquely analytic way of being”; Atlas’s view of a spiritual process in the ability to mourn; Sucharov’s use of complexity theory to define a “spiritual psychoanalytic practice”; Black’s hopeful elevation of psychoanalysis as a forum through which to allow us to speak again of “love of being” and a “transcendent” level of ethics; Allan