Finding Place for Religion: A Discussion of Lisa Cataldo’s “Where God is Between Us: Religious Experience, Surrender, and the Third in Clinical Perspective”

Abstract

Lisa Cataldo’s paper provides a robust rationale for the exploration of spiritual and religious experience in psychoanalytic treatment. Through a weaving of relational theory and clinical examples, she addresses the historic reductionism in psychoanalytic views of religion, the differences between spirituality and religion, and the inner and outer experiences, and she applies the concepts of surrender and the third to such experiences. In this discussion, Cataldo’s salient points are summarized and elaboration is offered. The commentary concludes with a cautionary note regarding the “survival of destruction,” which may prove more hazardous than anticipated.

Keywords:

• God
• intersubjectivity
• koinonia
• religion
• spirituality
• third.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marie T. Hoffman

Marie T. Hoffman, PhD, is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in Allentown, PA. She is on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Dr. Hoffman is founding director of the Society for Exploration of Psychoanalytic Therapies and Theology, and the Brookhaven Institute for Psychoanalysis and Christian Theology. She coedits the Routledge Book series Psyche and Soul. In addition to articles and book chapters, Dr. Hoffman is the author of two books: Toward Mutual Recognition: Relational Psychoanalysis and the Christian Narrative (2011) and When the Roll Is Called: Trauma and the Soul of American Evangelicalism (2016).