Can There Be a Psychoanalytic Spirituality? A Response to Kenneth Porter

Abstract

Whether and how an analyst might include spirituality in clinical work must take into account the complex and multidetermined nature of those aspects of life called “spiritual.” I consider several dangers that can inhere when spiritual experience is deemed “more real” than other experiences, when it is equated with the good, or when it is divorced from embodied (raced, classed, gendered) experience. These dangers can include inflation, spiritual bypass, and “happy blindness” to our own and others’ suffering. I suggest that a spiritual psychoanalysis, or a psychoanalytic spirituality, would hold in tension joy and love with suffering and hate, peace with conflict, power with powerlessness, and intuition with unknowing.

Keywords:

• spirituality
• psychoanalysis
• spiritual bypassing