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Dear Editor:
I am writing in response to Dr. Cythnia Stone's article “Opening Psychoanalytic Space to the Spiritual” in the June 2005 issue of The Psychoanalytic Review (Vol. 92, No. 3, pp. 417-430). I applaud Dr. Stone's interest in urging analytic clinicians to be more aware of their patients' spirituality and to incorporate that aspect of their patients' subjectivity into their work, and I certainly join with her in that goal. However, I feel that Dr. Stone's focus on a vague notion of spirituality and her view of spiritual development reflect a cultural bias toward individual autonomy that promotes a limited conceptualization of religion.
Bernard Spikla (Spilka, Hood, Hunsberger, & Gorsuch, 2003), who has written extensively on religion and psychology, has described spirituality as a term that “embraces obscurity with passion.” Dr. Stone's understanding of spirituality reflects that obscurity. She admits that there is “no one definition” of the term, but the “overlapping themes regarding spirituality” that she lists are so inclusive that it would be difficult to determine what spirituality is not. It seems to me that these themes apply as well to any in-depth psychoanalytic exploration. “Our deepest longings, fear, hopes and aspirations,… coming to know oneself as authentically as possible, thereby knowing the falseness of many senses of self,…a perception or sense of the ground of our being and the source of our meaning making, that is, subsumes morals, values, meaning, purpose, suffering, fulfillment, attitude toward death, and social justice” (p. 420)—what psychoanalysis worth the name does not encompass all these themes in a person's life?
Dr. Stone posits a developmental process in regard to spirituality, from preconventional to conventional to postconventional