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Psychoanalysis is a practice that claims to be open to all aspects of the human experience, but which has traditionally been closed to the domain of spirituality except as a defensive posture. My own interest in spirituality and psychoanalysis arises partly from the total lack of attention given to spirituality in my own psychoanalysis and training in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and partly from my subsequent, midlife awareness of how central spirituality is to all of life and to every genuine encounter.
It is now 75 years since Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion, which relegated religion and spirituality to the realm of pathology and regression. In subsequent years, most non-Jungian psychoanalysts have continued to keep their distance from religion and spirituality, conflating the two and disclaiming any personal involvement in either one. Jungian analysts have followed a different path, understanding that the spiritual or numinous is an essential psychic function. This view has been echoed by British object relations analysts such as Winnicott, Suttie, Fairbairn, Guntrip, and Bion, and more recently by Symington, Eigen, and Bollas. The explosion of interest in spirituality in the last decade or so has led not only to much diluted, misunderstood and popularized spirituality, but also to some thoughtful psychoanalytic writing from relational and intersubjective analysts as well as from analysts who have written on the congruence between Buddhist practice and psychoanalysis.
So what has happened? There have been at least three interrelated