Where God is Between Us: Religious Experience, Surrender, and the Third in Clinical Perspective

Abstract

When patients bring up material of a religious or spiritual nature, many analysts find themselves at a loss. There is a tendency in such moments either to reduce the patient’s experience to the most comfortable theoretical denominator or to accept such experiences uncritically. In this paper, the author places “religion” and religious experience in the relational context of formative early experience and argues that relational history is an important contributor to the capacity to have authentic and expansive religious experience. Drawing upon clinical examples and relational psychoanalytic concepts of surrender and the Third, the author suggests ways in which the analyst might interact with the patient’s religious and spiritual experiences by understanding them in terms of surrender and the opening to or foreclosure of thirdness.

Keywords:

• mutual recognition
• psychoanalysis
• religion
• spirituality
• surrender
• the third.

Acknowledgments

The present article represents the evolution of ideas I first worked on while in analytic training and which were initially developed in a writing group led by Bonnie Zindel, LCSW, in 2005. Versions of this paper were presented at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies Professional Association Fall Colloquium in October 2005 and at the International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy conference in Madrid, Spain, in June 2011.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ In recent years, the topic of spirituality has become more popular as a subject matter for psychological and psychoanalytic writers, whereas religion seems to be a less comfortable issue, as I discuss. A notable exception to this trend is Marie Hoffman’s (2011) Toward Mutual Recognition: Relational Psychoanalysis and the Christian Narrative, in which the author considers therapy in light of Christian theology. The present paper was originally drafted before the release of Hoffman’s book. Although I am not writing from a Christian perspective, there are similarities in the features of relational psychoanalysis that Hoffman and I identify as useful in understanding faith and religion.

² In Augustinian thought, memory, understanding, and will are the three capacities that set humans apart from animals and that, when placed in the service of spiritual goals, allow humans to have a relationship with the divine. Of interest, it is just these capacities that Bion asks the analyst to suspend (memory, understanding, and desire) in the analytic session in order to “be O” for and with the patient.

³ It is a short leap to connect Gentile’s description of the foundational Third to Jung’s (1938, 1947, 1959) idea of the collective unconscious, in that the collective unconscious as described by Jung is precisely an “impersonal,” preexistent template of possibility that organizes human experience. The archetypal patterns of the collective unconscious are described by Jung as “the images of the instincts,” by which he means that the symbolic and imagistic expressions that organize meaning arise out of an underlying, body-based set of patterns established in the evolutionary development of human potentials. For Jung, the ultimately unknowable totality of human potential (the Self) finds unique and unrepeatable expression in each individual life. Although Jung’s focus remained more on the individual person’s relationship to the archetypal layer as the foundation of subjectivity (the process of individuation) and less on the nuances and influences of interpersonal relational history, his theory nonetheless resonates with contemporary intersubjectivity theory’s interest in the transcendent, primordial or foundational Third. The foundational Third is deeply structured human potential, grounded in the body, that is manifested in infinite personal variety in the individual, intersubjectively related life.

⁴ I and Thou, the seminal work by Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (1970), proposes that true recognition in religious experience requires the “you-ness” of God—God is not a thing but a Thou. In an earlier footnote (4), Ricoeur’s reference to Hegel addressed the same issue—that recognition is the “spiritual phenomenon par excellence.”

⁵ The reader should know that I am not a “Christian therapist” in the way that the term is used in counseling circles.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa M. Cataldo

Lisa M. Cataldo, MDiv, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Pastoral Counseling at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education at Fordham University. She is a faculty member and supervisor at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies in New York City and is on the faculty of the Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center. She serves as co-chair of the Psychology, Culture, and Religion Unit of the American Academy of Religion. Lisa’s research and writing focus on the intersection of psychoanalysis and religion/spirituality and include issues of trauma and multiplicity, intersubjectivity, and experiences of the other. She is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York.