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Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 10: 235–269Copyright © 2013 National Institute for the PsychotherapiesISSN: 1551-806X (print) / 2163-6958 (online)DOI: 10.1080/00330124.2013.826952

CAN THERE BE A SPIRITUAL PSYCHOANALYSIS?

KENNETH PORTER, MD

Why might a 21st-century psychoanalyst be interested in spirituality? Spiritualityis increasingly permeating both our culture and the consciousness of our patients,and can offer a new vision for psychoanalytic theory and practice. This paperpresents the new paradigm of spiritual psychoanalysis. We will first take up ourresistances to spirituality, next consider the meaning of spirituality, and thenreview the history of spirituality in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. We willthen explore the possibilities for a spiritual model of the self, a spiritual model ofanalytic process, and a spiritual model of analytic technique. In this the goal isnot to replace the traditional valuable aspects of psychoanalysis, but rather to seeif we can learn to do even better what we already know how to do well.

Keywords: spirituality, psychoanalysis, self, psychoanalytic technique.

The absence of psychoneurosis may be health, but it is not life.—D.W. Winnicott (1971/2002)

Why might a 21st-century psychoanalyst be interested in spiritual-ity? Freud’s original vision offered the radical promise of humanfreedom, based on a fearless search for the truth of the humanpsyche. In the last century, this vision has been enriched by newinsights and perspectives. As spirituality—we will see shortly whatthat might mean—increasingly influences our patients and oursociety, it offers the possibility of another new perspective: a newspiritual model of the self, a new understanding of psychoanalytichealing, and powerful suggestions for psychoanalytic technique.

Much has been written on spiritually oriented psychotherapy,but a comprehensive theory of it has not yet emerged. This essayrepresents a first step toward such a theory. I believe that integrat-ing the insights of the great spiritual traditions into our clinical

Address correspondence to Kenneth Porter, MD, 25 East 87th Street, #11G, New York,NY 10128. E-mail: [email protected]

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236 Kenneth Porter, MD

work can offer us the possibility of learning how to do even betterwhat we already know how to do well.

A word about my personal perspective. I am a 69-year-old psy-chiatrist originally trained in classical psychoanalytic approachesto treatment who for the last 25 years has explored the worldof spirituality in a personal and professional way, studying theKundalini Science of India with Swami ChandrasekharanandSaraswati; the Buddhism of Southeast Asia with Jack Kornfield;and the Diamond Approach of A. H. Almaas. It is especially thework of Almaas that has profoundly affected me. This work, wellknown in spiritual circles but as yet barely known to analysts,integrates Eastern spirituality with Western psychoanalysis, andforms the main theoretical scaffolding for much of what I will beexploring (Almaas, 1986, 1988, 2004).

We will begin by considering what is generally meant by theword “spirituality,” then we will consider the history of spiritualapproaches to psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Next we will takeup the theory of the soul, self, and identity in this new approach,go on to explore the nature of analytic healing, and conclude withsome reflections on spiritual psychoanalytic technique. Like anygood clinician, I will start with our resistances.

Barriers to Understanding Spirituality

For a Western psychoanalyst attempting to understand spirituality,three barriers immediately arise. These are the limitations of theWestern philosophical worldview, the confusion between spiritu-ality and religion, and the “New Age” connotations of the word“spirituality.”

The Western Worldview

We have inherited our Western worldview from centuries of intel-lectual development. This worldview is both empirical and materi-alistic. It is epistemologically empirical, as was the 17th-centurywork of Francis Bacon and John Locke, in assuming that thebasic pathway to knowledge is physical experience. In other words,knowledge is considered fundamentally not to come via cognitionof the mind and not via intuition, but rather via the direct appre-hension of concrete experience. Our current Western worldview

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Can There Be a Spiritual Psychoanalysis? 237

is also ontologically materialist, as was the Scientific Revolution ofthe 17th century, in assuming that the basic nature of reality isphysical, as opposed to nonmaterial.

On the other hand, the great spiritual traditions have adifferent foundation. Judaism (in its esoteric or secret version,Kabbalah), mystical Christianity, Buddhism, the Yoga Vedanta tra-dition, Sufism (the esoteric branch of Islam), and the aboriginalshamanistic traditions hold to the perspectives that in Westernphilosophy have been known as rationalism and realism. Theyare epistemologically rationalist in believing that the pathway toknowledge is not direct physical experience but via human facul-ties other than physical perception. They are ontologically realistin believing that the ultimate nature of reality is not material. It isinteresting to note that prior to the 17th century, the Westernworldview was also rationalist and realist. In fact, the philosophersconsidered to be the early towering figures of the Western intellec-tual tradition—Socrates and Plato—were so in ways similar to thegreat spiritual traditions. Platonism went on to dominate Westernthought for over a thousand years. It was only in the Middle Ages,starting with Aquinas, that Western thought began to shift, firstto Aristotelian thought, and then to the philosophy and scienceof the 17th century. This led Western thought into its currentempiricist and materialist framework.

So when we, as empirically and materialistically mindedWestern psychoanalysts, begin to entertain the possibility of a spir-itual perspective, it is important to remember two facts. First, evenwithin our own Western tradition there are alternatives to our cur-rent empirical and materialist philosophical assumptions. Second,our often unconscious and unquestioned empirical and materi-alist worldview may inhibit us from fully grasping the spiritualperspective.

Spirituality and Religion

A second barrier to understanding spirituality for Western psy-choanalysts is the confusion between “spirituality” and “reli-gion.” Occasionally in the history of our species an individualarises who possesses an uncommon degree of wisdom, love, andpersonal maturity. Such individuals—Moses, the Buddha, Jesus,Mohammed—inspire others with their vision, generally termed

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“spirituality” by scholars and intellectual historians. Students clus-ter around these teachers, who are not interested in creating anew religion, but generally are focused on revitalizing the religionwithin which they themselves have matured. Their students, how-ever, seeing their lives profoundly transformed by their teacher’sspirituality, wish to perpetuate this core spiritual vision after theirteacher’s death. So an organized body of teachings and prac-tices develops around the original teacher’s spiritual vision. Thisbecomes an institutionalized religion, which over time inevitablybecomes rigidified and bureaucratized.

Most of us in the West have had encounters with religion, par-ticularly the Judeo-Christian version, rather than with the morefresh and spontaneous experience of spirituality. For us “spiritual-ity” may become conflated with “religion,” and religion may meanartificiality and lack of aliveness. This unconscious bias or linkagemay block us from appreciating the transformative power of a spir-itual approach that is radically different from what we think of asreligion. We will explore shortly what the term “spirituality” mightmean.

Although this distinction between religion and spirituality isnot always clear, and at times can be an oversimplification, it canhelp us in questioning our preconceptions as we approach thestudy of spirituality.

The “New Age” Movement

Finally on our list of barriers to understanding spirituality is theconfusion between genuine spirituality and what have come to beknown as “New Age” beliefs. Many of us came to maturity in the1960s and 1970s, and “spirituality” may mean to us an ill-definedbut vaguely flaky conglomeration of naked hippies, encountergroup marathons, and crystal- and past-life-reading Internet min-isters. Because the field of spirituality, possibly even more thanother fields, has its share of poseurs and self-promoting narcissists,it is important not to confuse the wheat with the chaff.

What Is Spirituality?

Many of us have had moments when life seemed exquisitely beau-tiful. These may occur at life’s peak moments—a marriage, the

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birth of a child—or they may come at moments that seem moreordinary, such as watching a beautiful sunset, listening to music,writing a poem, making love, or doing therapy. They may alsooccur at times of crisis—the loss of a loved one, the onset oflife-threatening illness, a life-threatening accident.

At these times, we may feel that life is more intense and “real”than usual, that life is more meaningful. We might have a senseof feeling at one with what is around us, or feeling that life is“perfect” or “beautiful.” We might notice deep insights and intu-itions, or have an overwhelming feeling of joy or peacefulness.We may feel overflowing with love, or brilliantly clear in our think-ing, with moments of penetrating insight and awareness—evenwonder. Often it seems to us that we have touched on a deeperdimension of existence than the one in which we usually live, andwe may feel a more immediate sense of aliveness. At these timesof penetrating insight, awareness, and even wonder, we may feelsomething like “Ah, this is what life is about.”

This dimension of experience can arrive in many flavors,as I am suggesting, but the quality that all these flavors have incommon is a sense that life is more alive and more meaningfulthan usual, and that we have entered what feels like a dimensionof life that is more “real” and more “true” than our usual lives.For the purposes of this paper, I will term this the core spiritualexperience. This core spiritual experience has been known forthousands of years to poets, artists, philosophers, lovers, and stu-dents. Athletes know it as “being in the zone” (Leonard, 1974).In the late 1960s, the psychologist Abraham Maslow introducedthis level of experience into our field, terming it “peak experi-ence” (Maslow, 1968). And it is not foreign to some among themost recent generation of psychoanalysts. Here is a description ofsuch an experience that occurred to me 10 years ago:

I was attending a nine-day retreat of the spiritual school in which I am astudent, the Diamond Approach. The retreat, a mixture of meditation, lec-tures, and interpersonal exercises, was taught by A. H. Almaas, the founderof the school. It consisted of an exploration of how our perception of theworld, which we normally take for granted, is highly influenced by the pre-conceptions (preexisting concepts and categories) of what we expect tosee, built into the structure of our brains from the earliest moments ofour lives. In the retreat, Almaas slowly and carefully deconstructed oureveryday view of the world, eventually introducing us to the possibility

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of seeing the world in its original pristine nakedness and magical beauty,unencumbered by our ideas. Although this may sound inviting, in fact itwas remarkably disturbing. All the normal ways we have of experiencingreality were constantly being challenged. At one point I remember stand-ing up and expressing to Almaas that I felt radically disoriented, as if I werean infant whose brain was being poisoned by his mother.

Following the retreat, I was startled to notice that a powerful shifthad occurred in my consciousness. In my practice and teachingof psychotherapy, and in my teaching of meditation, I seemed tohave developed a new capacity for intuition and insight. It felt asif a sparkling fountain of light had opened up inside my head.My insights seemed shockingly and inexplicably deep and correct.Occasionally someone would ask me to explain what I was doing,but I was at a loss to explain it. This went on for about six monthsand then gradually subsided, leaving behind a milder version ofthe experience that has stayed with me ever since.

Freud’s Understanding

Freud made an attempt to understand the core spiritual experi-ence in his famous response to a letter from the French authorRomain Rolland. Rolland had described states of “oceanic feel-ing,” and Freud saw such events as regressive reexperiences of anearly sense of symbiotic merger with a mothering figure (Freud,1930). But because of his background and the culture in whichhe lived, Freud was limited in his ability to understand the expe-riences of spirituality to which Rolland was referring. Epstein hasexplored Freud’s limitations in this interchange (Epstein, 1990).

Fundamentally, if we consider the various spiritual experi-ences I mentioned earlier—experiences of deep oneness, wisdom,joy, insight, meaningfulness, peacefulness, or love that may occurin extraordinary moments of our lives, it is hard to imagine thatour adult experience is merely regressive, or truly identical tothe experiences we have as four-month-olds. This crucial pointhas also been addressed by the spiritual philosopher Ken Wilburin his concept of the “pre/trans fallacy” (Wilber, 1995). Wilberpoints out that certain very early infantile experiences (“pre-rational” experiences) bear a superficial similarity to matureadult spiritual experiences (“trans-personal” experiences). Bothare extremely difficult to conceptualize and articulate. But

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the superficial similarities actually obscure the fundamentaldifferences. One type of experience is regressive, and limitedby infantile lack of understanding, while the other includes themature consciousness of a human adult. In fact one characteristicof adult spiritual experience is precisely the presence of aspectsof infantile experience coexisting with adult consciousness.

The Spiritual Worldview

There is a better way than Freud’s to understand these corespiritual experiences, but it requires us to significantly alter ourview of what constitutes reality. Normally, as I have said, we con-sider that our experience occurs mainly on the materialist level.We also make room for two other levels of experience: the affec-tive (emotional feelings) and the cognitive (ideas). But the greatspiritual traditions have taught for thousands of years that thereis another level of experience, called spiritual, that is qualitativelydifferent from any of these three levels, and that can be experi-enced paradoxically as “deeper” and also “higher,” and also more“real” or more “true.” Somewhat oversimplifying, perhaps, from apsychoanalytic point of view, this fundamental level has variouslybeen called subtle energy, vibration, spirit, soul, the divine within,Buddha nature, Christ consciousness, essence, presence, the trueself, the higher self, and the ground of being, among many otherthings. However limited our psychoanalytic conceptions of it maybe, this core spiritual experience has been explored and mappedfor thousands of years by spiritual teachers, saints, and mystics.

Moreover, the great spiritual traditions invite us as Westernanalysts to be open to the possibility that spiritual experience maynot simply be subjective, as we usually might think of it; rather,spiritual experience may actually be objective, in the same sensethat we usually consider a table or a chair to be objectively real.In a profound sense this “objectively real spiritual experience”might actually turn out to be more important and real than thematerial, affective, or cognitive realms that we are so accustomedto considering the most real.

Interestingly, the worldview of the core spiritual experience—that the material world is not the ultimate reality—is remarkablysimilar to the descriptions of reality proposed by modernphysicists, and particularly by Einstein and the quantum physicists.

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For example, in his general theory of relativity in 1905, Einsteinstated that it made no more sense to say that the basic natureof reality is “matter” than to say that the basic nature of reality is“energy.” Energy and matter were seen to be interchangeable—that is, matter is energy, and vice versa. According to Einstein, thelevel of reality that is nonmaterial—which is energy—is just as realas what we normally consider to be the most real—which is matter.

Similarly, the quantum mechanics developed in the 1920sby Heisenberg, Bohr, and Schrodinger constituted another majorbreakthrough in the Western view of reality, in two different ways.First, these theorists took up the problem of the nature of light.Was it a wave or a particle—was it, in other words, energy ormatter? Quantum mechanics went on to postulate that both the-ories were valid, in a way that was analogous to Einstein’s view ofreality. It simply depended on one’s point of view, and on what wasmost heuristically useful to solve the problems of the moment.

Second, these physicists took up the problem of the nature ofthe electron, a supposedly basic “material” building block of theuniverse. They postulated that it cannot simply be assumed that anelectron is material. Instead, it came to be thought of as a probabil-ity of a certain event occurring at a given time in space. In otherwords, an electron was no longer considered an actual material“particle,” but rather a “likelihood.” What was considered the most“real” level of existence was no longer the material (electron as aparticle) but the nonmaterial (electron as a probability).

Now let us consider what might be the relevance of spiritualexperience to us as analysts. First it is of note that spiritual expe-rience is not confined to the few, but is accessible to most humanbeings. Furthermore, the capacity for such experience can betrained, through practice. Spiritual practice, it turns out, is basedon a great armamentarium of tools, including meditation, med-itative body work (yoga, Chi Gung, martial arts), study of sacredwritings, prayer, chanting, control of the senses, and loving serviceto others, among many others. In fact, virtually any activity, if per-formed with a certain orientation, can become spiritual practice.This includes, for example, artistic activity, sports, the activities ofdaily living—and, of course, writing about and practicing psycho-analysis. It is also of note that if we do intentionally embark onspiritual practice, we find that rather than remaining confined toa few isolated moments in our lives, spiritual experience begins

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to permeate our day-to-day existence. We can start to experiencegreater insight and openness, and develop an increased capacityto be genuine and loving.

The experiences of spirituality that we have been discussingare not unknown to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. To explorethis further, we will turn to history.

The History of Spiritually Oriented Psychoanalysis andPsychotherapy

At roughly the same time as Freud’s original publications aroundthe turn of the century—Studies in Hysteria in 1895 and TheInterpretation of Dreams in 1900—the American psychologist andphilosopher of pragmatism William James gave the famouslectures in Edinburgh that became the basis of The Varieties ofReligious Experience. In these lectures, James called for a new“science of religious experience” (Freud, 1895, 1900; James,1902/1987). At the same time, the first two pioneers of spiritualpsychotherapy began to publish their work: the Swiss analyst CarlJung, and the Italian analyst Roberto Assagioli.

Jung had begun, at age 30, as an admirer and colleague ofFreud’s, and at one point was the president of the InternationalPsychoanalytic Association. After an intense six-year friendship,their relationship came to an end with the publication of Jung’sfirst major work, Psychology of the Unconscious (Jung, 1910/1993).Jung went on to develop over half a century of profoundly influ-ential psychological work, whose hallmark was his conviction thatthe search for spiritual significance is the main developmentaltask of the second half of human life. Although Jung termed hisapproach “analytical psychology” to clearly differentiate it frompsychoanalysis, Jung continued to employ the basic psychoanalyticconcepts of transference, resistance, the unconscious, dreaminterpretation, and genetic exploration.

Assagioli, less well-known than Jung, published his bookPsychosynthesis in 1905 (Assagioli, 1905/1977). Like Jung originallyan adherent to the new movement of psychoanalysis, Assagiolialso went on to develop his own theory of psychotherapy, basedon a highly sophisticated understanding of the role of spiritualphenomena—what he called “the higher self”—in human devel-opment and healing.

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Buddhist Influences

In the 1950s, the most famous academic Buddhist teacher in theUnited States was D.T. Suzuki. His historic seminar at ColumbiaUniversity, attended by, among others, Erich Fromm and KarenHorney (as well as artists such as John Cage), had an endur-ing effect on American psychoanalysis (Suzuki, Fromm, & DeMartino, 1960). Following this, in the 1960s and 1970s, a num-ber of prominent Buddhist teachers came to teach in America:another Zen teacher named Suzuki (Shunryu), two major TibetanBuddhist leaders (Chogyam Trungpa and Tarthang Tulku); andsubsequently three young Americans who had been students ofVipassana Buddhism in Asia—Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein,and Sharon Salzberg—followed. All these Buddhist teachers wereto have a major effect on those of the next generation of Americanpsychotherapists and analysts who had a spiritual perspective.

Existential Analysis

Also during the early part of the 20th century, a new movementarose in European psychoanalysis—Existential Analysis—that hadcertain similarities to the spiritually oriented psychotherapy ofJung and Assagioli. Existential analysis was influenced by the 19th-century work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and directly emergedfrom the philosophical work of Husserl, Husserl’s student MartinHeidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. These existential analysts took astheir main challenge the project of helping patients “pass to anauthentic modality of existence” (Ellenberger, 1958). Heidegger’srevolutionary philosophical work had identified a mode of liv-ing that he called “being-in-the-world”—the life of the authentichuman being—many of whose aspects are similar to what I havebeen calling the core spiritual experience (Heidegger, 1962).Beginning with the work of Ludwig Binswanger (a lifelong friendof Freud) and Eugene Minkowski, existential analysts broughtthe basic ideas of the existential philosophers into the theoryand practice of psychoanalysis. This work was then brought tothe United States in the 1950s by Rollo May in his influentialbook Existence, and developed by others (Binswanger, 1946/1958;Minkowski, 1933; May, Angel, & Ellenberger, 1958; Bugenthal,1987; Yalom, 1980, for example).

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Transpersonal Psychology

Later, in the 1970s, a group of psychologists in Californiaembarked on the project of integrating the great spiritual tradi-tions into 20th-century psychology and psychotherapy. Termingthis approach “transpersonal psychology,” they took up WilliamJames’s challenge to develop a science of religious experience,and also pursued Jung’s idea that while the developmental taskof the first half of life is to master external reality, the task of thesecond half of life is to develop spiritual maturity. Although nevera defined school, many prominent psychologists were associatedwith this movement, including Abraham Maslow, Stanislaf andChristina Grof, Ken Wilber, Michael Washburn, John Nelson,Frances Vaughn, Roger Walsh, Charles Tart, and many others.Maslow in particular developed a new branch of psychology, basedon what he called “self-actualization” (Maslow, 1968).

At the end of the last century, this spiritual ferment beganto affect the practice of psychoanalysis itself. Many psychoanalystsand psychotherapists explored the relevance of religious and spir-itual experience to clinical practice. These have included W. R.Bion, Michael Eigen, Emmanuel Ghent, Jeffrey Rubin, DianeShainberg, Mark Finn, Paul Cooper, Tony Stern, Joseph Bobrow,Jack Engler, Polly Young-Eisendrath, Barry Magid and Joko Beck,Robert Langan, Jeremy Safran, Sara Weber, Henry Grayson, VictorSchermer, John Welwood, and many others (Cooper, 2007; Engler,2003; Finn, 2003; Grayson, 2003; Magid & Beck, 2002; Molino,1998; Rubin, 1996; Safran, 2003; Schermer, 2002; Welwood, 2000).It is probably Mark Epstein’s work, written with psychoanalyticsophistication and personal authenticity, that has done most tobring spiritually oriented psychoanalysis to the attention of thepublic (Epstein, 1995, 1998, 2001).

Bion

W. R. Bion also developed ideas that in some ways paralleled thesespiritual developments within psychotherapy. In his later years,and especially in “Attention and Interpretation” (Bion, 1970/

1977), Bion developed the concept of what he termed “O,” a con-cept that has much in common with the core spiritual experience:

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I shall use the sign O to denote that which is the ultimate reality repre-sented by terms such as ultimate reality, absolute truth, the godhead, theinfinite, the thing-in-itself . . . . It stands for the absolute truth in and ofany object; it is assumed that this cannot be known by any human being, itcan be known about, its presence can be recognized and felt, but it cannotbe known. It is possible to be at one with it (Bion, 1970/1977, p. 214).

Soul, Self, and Identity in Spiritual Psychoanalysis

There is, however deeply buried or frozen, a longing for something in theenvironment to make possible the surrender, in the sense of yielding, ofthe false self.

—Emmanuel Ghent (1990/1999)

Before beginning our exploration of this central issue in psy-choanalysis, and my suggestions for a new conceptual scheme, Iwant to acknowledge the extreme complexity of this subject andthe lack of unanimity in our field about such terms as “self” or“identity,” to say nothing of the idea of adding the notion of “thesoul” to our discourse. I also want to acknowledge that my pro-posal below to equate “soul” and “self” may seem reductionistic,and would be challenged by many, in part because of the religiousconnotations of the term “soul.” I will attempt to clarify this mat-ter further as we proceed. For now what I am proposing is onepossible way of introducing the spiritual into psychoanalysis, andI claim for it only that it seems to me clinically and heuristicallyuseful, not that it is a fully evolved or final perspective.

History

The word “self” seems to have come into common psychoanalyticusage in interpersonal, neo-Freudian, and self-psychological psy-choanalysis. Today, in common analytic parlance, my sense is thatit is roughly used as a synonym for what used to be called thepsyche—that is, for the nonmaterial aspect of the individual. Priorto Freud, the term used in Western intellectual history for thisaspect of the individual was usually the word “soul” (Greek “psy-che”), as used in a nonreligious sense by Plato and Aristotle, andas used in a religious sense by the Judeo-Christian and Islamictraditions.

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Freud’s View of the Soul

Freud (1927, 1930) made no secret of his belief that religion andspirituality were neurotic phenomena. He did employ the conceptof the soul as a fundamental part of his system of psychoanalyticthought, but only in the nonspiritual sense of the word.Bettelheim has clarified this for us, pointing out that Freud con-sistently used the word “soul” (German “seele”) as a direct trans-lation of the Greek “psyche” (although Strachey and other trans-lators of Freud have usually given us the word “mind” for Freud’s“seele”). As Bettelheim writes of Freud, “where he is conceptualiz-ing the working of the psyche, distinguishing the conscious fromthe unconscious and distinguishing the id, ego, and superego,he uses the term ‘soul’ to describe what he regards as the over-arching concept that takes in all the others” (Bettelheim, 1982).Another example of Freud’s nonspiritual use of the word “soul”is his statement in Some Elementary Lessons in Psycho-analysis, (trans-lated by Bettelheim), “Psychoanalysis is a part of psychology whichis dedicated to the science of the soul” (Bettelheim, op. cit.).

It is clear that Freud’s use of the word “soul” did not have spir-itual connotations. However, it seems to me he may have comeclose to what I would call a spiritual, though decidedly not reli-gious, orientation in his letter to his long-standing friend, theSwiss minister and analyst Pfister, saying, “I want to entrust it (psy-choanalysis) to a profession that doesn’t yet exist, a profession ofsecular ministers of souls, who don’t have to be physicians andmust not be priests” (Bettelheim, 1982). In this paper I will followFreud in naming this nonmaterial, overarching aspect of the indi-vidual the “soul,” though at times I will use the terms “soul” and“self” interchangeably.

The Self in Traditional Psychoanalysis

In the traditional psychoanalytic view, the self might be seen ashaving four main characteristics: (a) it is conceptualized as split;b) it is psychodynamic or conflicted; (c) it is separate from otherselves; and (d) it is the locus of experience, including suffering.These understandings are so basic they typically form an unques-tioned set of working assumptions in our daily clinical work.Of course, different theories of analysis understand the nature of

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conflict within the self in different terms: for example, as betweenthe conscious and unconscious; between ego, id, and superego;between differing object relations units; between different aspectsof the self system; or between dissociated ego states or dissociated“selves,” to name just a few.

As a supplement to this, I would like to offer a spiritualconcept of the self to possibly bring a deeper dimension to ourtraditional understanding of psychoanalytic process.

The Authentic (Core Spiritual) Self

In the course of our lives, most of us have the capacity to livein two quite different ways. One—our most frequent mode—isthe mode of our usual personality, which follows the traditionalanalytic model of the self—split, psychodynamic, separate fromother selves, and the seat of experience and unhappiness. Thiscould be called the mode of our social self, our ordinary self, ourhabitual self, our conditioned self, our persona, or simply, as I willrefer to it, our familiar self. It has also been called the “false self,” adistinction that takes on particular meaning in contrast to the spir-itual experience of the self (Winnicott, 1960/1990). When we arereferring to that aspect of the familiar self that is our self-reflectiveawareness of the familiar self, I will label it, following Erik Erikson,ego identity (Erikson, 1968).

In contrast to the mode of the familiar self, when we are inthe mode of the core spiritual experience, we are whole. Theusual conflicts—structural, dynamic, dissociative—are experien-tially absent. This self is also intrinsically connected to other selves.At these times we experience it as fundamentally pure, healthy,and sane. As we shall see, this self can be increasingly experi-enced and eventually stabilized through the process of spiritualpsychoanalysis.

A number of analysts have pointed to this experience, mostnotably Winnicott, though at that stage of his thinking, Winnicottconfined his use of the concept to a small group of his (border-line) patients. A number of other analysts have suggested similarconcepts—Masterson’s real self, Kohut’s healthy nuclear self—but there seems to be no term in current psychoanalytic thinkingthat completely captures the experience of this spiritual mode ofthe self (Winnicott, 1960/1990; Masterson, 1988; Kohut, 1984).

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My preference would be for a term that has roots in the exis-tentialist philosophical works of Sartre and Heidegger, in thetranspersonal work of Maslow, and that is currently in use by theAmerican spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen: the “authentic self”(Cohen, 2008). What I am calling the authentic self has also beentermed the “core spiritual self” (Schermer, 2002; Grayson, 2003).

Here are some examples of this authentic self, as distin-guished from the familiar self, from recent psychoanalytic writ-ings: “I have heard many people say that when they focuson I-feeling and let it resonate, they sense reverberations of adeeper fuller self, not merely as object, but as subject” (Eigen,1991/1999). The existential analyst Rollo May (May et al., 1958)spoke of the patient’s experience of “I-am.” And Jung’s conceptof the Self as the coherent, unified, and organizing center of theself—as opposed to the ego—refers to this same experience.

The Distinction Between the Familiar Self and Authentic Self inEastern Spiritual Traditions and in Lacan

The Eastern spiritual traditions have made the distinction betweenthe familiar self and the authentic self for many thousands ofyears. The familiar self is considered in the East to be an artifi-cial construction of the mind, based on self-images incorporatedin childhood. It is distinguished from the nonmaterial spiritualaspect of the individual that I am terming the authentic self,that in the Yoga Vedanta tradition is called “atman” and in theBuddhist tradition is called Buddha nature.

In the West, the distinction between familiar and authenticself has been illuminated in a technical paper by Epstein (1988)and also, from another perspective, by Lacan, in his well-knowndiscussion of the ego and the mirror stage of childhood develop-ment. (Lacan speaks here of the ego as roughly equivalent to egoidentity, so far as I can determine):

Lacan describes the formation of ego identity as based on illusion. Thechild sees in the mirror (or in the mirror of her mother’s face) an illu-sory image of wholeness which is actually an imaginary experience, butwhich the child takes to be an exact reflection of who she really is (Lacan,1949/2002). “The ego is an imaginary production, a crystallization orsedimentation of images of an individual’s own body and of self-imagesreflected back to him or her by others. In contradistinction to Freud,

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Lacan maintains that this crystallization does not constitute an agency, butrather an object” (Fink, 1995).

I want to emphasize that I am not labeling Lacanian analy-sis “spiritual.” Rather, his analysis, which in modern terminologymight be called constructivist, points out the limitations of ourusual way of conceptualizing the self. This can open the door to adeeper and potentially spiritual view of the self.

In summary, the conceptual scheme that I am proposing usesthe term “soul” or “self” to refer to the broadest aspect of what isnonmaterial within the human being. The authentic self and thefamiliar self are two different possible organizations of this soul.

For purposes of clarification, I want to add that the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions employ the concept of “soul” in adifferent way. These traditions do have a concept of what I am call-ing the authentic self, but, confusingly for us, they use the word“soul” to refer to this “authentic self.” In my terminology, “soul”refers to the broader nonmaterial aspect of the human being,which can at times be organized into the authentic self or thefamiliar self.

Relevance to Psychoanalytic Technique

Several important points can be suggested based on this discus-sion of the authentic (spiritual) self and the familiar self. First,in this view of spiritual psychoanalysis, suffering or unhappinessis not caused by conflict within the self, but by separation fromthe authentic self. Second, for most individuals, the authenticself turns out to be even more repressed or dissociated than theFreudian unconscious. It seems ironic that there is an aspect ofunconscious process more threatening to us than even our deep-est experiences of sadism, sexuality, guilt, and shame—and thisdeeper aspect is the spiritual unconscious, the authentic self. Thisis the level of mature strength, power, wisdom, love, joy, peace,and oneness that is a potential for us all. Referring to Bion’s con-cept of “O”—which is the authentic self’s experience of spiritualreality—Eigen writes, “To id, ego, and superego resistance, add O-resistance. One wants and fears nothing more than what is real”(Eigen, 1998).

In a recent work, the spiritual teacher A. H. Almaas outlineshis belief that in infancy all human beings are able to experience

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a version of the authentic self (called “Essence” in his under-standing), and that this is gradually repressed or dissociated asa result of the normal maturational need to develop a socializedego structure (Almaas, 2004). This idea that the experience of theauthentic self may be lost is supported by a growing orientationwithin our field to privilege the concept of “dissociation” over theconcept of “repression.” It has become apparent in clinical workthat entire “self-states” may be dissociated, and that dissociation infact may be a basic defense employed by all individuals, not justthose suffering from dissociative identity disorder.

This point of view dates from Janet’s groundbreaking work,of course. Recently it has been suggested that, among analyti-cally oriented psychotherapists, Jung may have been the first tobelieve that dissociation was more primary than repression as adefensive operation (Schwartz-Salant, 1995). This idea was elabo-rated in Fairbairn’s proposal that not just ideas, feelings, or objectscould be repressed, but also active organizations of the self, so thatevery individual may be subject to ego-splitting (Fairbairn, 1952).Sullivan also touched on similar ideas in his concept of “the good-me, the bad-me, and the not-me” (Sullivan, 1953), and Grotsteinhas proposed the concept of “dual-I-ness” (Grotstein, 1999).

As studies of trauma have increasingly influenced our field,many analysts have taken these concepts further, with Bromberg(1998) stating that all personality disorders are dissociation-based,and that the unconscious is best understood as containing disso-ciated self-states. Davies’s work similarly embodies her belief thatthe unconscious may best be thought of as dissociative rather thanrepressive. In her work with Frawley, for example, Davies (Davies &Frawley, 1994) has explored the clinical usefulness of conceptual-izing split “selves” in patients who have suffered childhood sexualabuse. (For an excellent overview of dissociation in analytic theory,see Howell, 2005.)

A New Paradigm of Soul, Self, and Identity

To formulate a new theoretical paradigm, we could take as a start-ing point the work of Almaas. Almaas suggests that we view thesoul (or self) in the largest possible terms, being defined as a fieldof consciousness. For psychoanalytic purposes, I will take this as auseful working definition of the soul or self.

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According to Almaas, this field of consciousness has severalcharacteristics. First, the consciousness that is the soul is highlymalleable. It can take on many different forms. We already knowthis from a cursory examination of the extraordinary range ofhuman potential—from saint to psychopath. Second, and veryimportant with regard to healing, the soul is dynamic. It canchange and grow. And third, the soul has the capacity to identify(Almaas, 2004).

What is the relationship of the soul to the familiar self andto the authentic self? The key is the process of identification.We could say that the soul has the capacity to identify with the self-organization that is the familiar self. This is the usual situation,and is true of both patient and analyst. In this case I experi-ence myself as being my familiar self, having my usual personality,thoughts, feelings, and preferences. But the soul can also identifywith the self-organization that is the authentic self. For most of usthis only occurs at extraordinary moments in our lives, and thenfor brief periods of time.

It can expand our horizons as psychoanalysts, however, toconsider the possibility that the soul could identify with theauthentic self more and more frequently, and eventually perma-nently, and that this might be an achievable, practical goal forpsychoanalysis. Then my fundamental identity would be trans-formed, and I might increasingly live in an ongoing experienceof deeper wisdom, love, and joy. The usual identity of the familiarself would transform into the identity of the authentic self. I wouldthen be in the position that Eigen describes, speaking of the goalof a therapy modeled on Winnicott’s principles: “A Winnicottiantherapy aims at working through the individual’s profound deper-sonalization in a way that makes access to true self feeling possible”(Eigen, 1991/1999).

Now if we were to take the goal of spiritual psychoanalysis tobe that of helping our patients shift their identity from the familiarto the authentic self, what might be the process between analystand patient that would facilitate this transformation?

The Therapeutic Process in Spiritual Psychoanalysis

The point at issue is how to pass from “knowing phenomena” to “being”that which is real . . . . Is it possible through psychoanalytic interpretation

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to effect a transition from knowing the phenomena of the real self to“being the real self”?

—W. R. Bion (1965/1977)

Probably no subject has intrigued us as psychoanalysts, orfrustrated us more, than the question, as Kohut has put it, “Howdoes analysis cure?” (Kohut, 1984). Having had the opportunityto read and ponder, over the last 40 years, some of what has beenwritten on this, I have been struck by two things. First, I have yetto feel I have ever read a completely convincing account of thetherapeutic action of psychoanalysis. Second, I continue, as domany of us, to try to formulate such an account.

Traditional and Contemporary Models of the Psychoanalytic Process

Many suggestions have been made as to what heals in psycho-analysis. It has been suggested that healing occurs when theunconscious is made conscious; when sufficient attention hasbeen paid by analyst and analysand to ego defenses to allow theunconscious to emerge; when the unrealistic nature of internal-ized object relational structures has been clarified; when sufficientempathy has been provided to the unhealed self; when maturerelating in the analytic situation is established as a standpoint fromwhich to reexperience, and understand in a new way, older dys-functional relational patterns; or when dissociated self-states orselves have been integrated into a newly mature self—to namejust a few. The capacity to shift flexibly among all these useful the-oretical perspectives from patient to patient and from session tosession (and even within sessions) has been thoughtfully exploredby such analysts as Lichtenberg, Lachmann, & Fosshage (1996),Pine (1990), Stark (1999), and Karasu (2001).

It is not my intention to discard these approaches. As Jung—the spiritual psychotherapist par excellence—stated, “One doesnot become enlightened by imagining beings of light, but bymaking the darkness visible.” In other words, the traditionaland current psychoanalytic approaches to healing are crucialand indispensable to a spiritual psychoanalytic approach. But Ibelieve that infusing these time-tested approaches with a spiritualperspective can enrich and expand our analytic capabilities.

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Healing in Spiritual Psychoanalysis—Step 1: Disidentifyingfrom the Familiar Self

I am saying that the job of the patient in spiritual analysis isto develop the capacity to shift identity from the familiar tothe authentic self. As May puts it, “The aim of therapy is thatthe patient experience his existence as real” (May et al., 1958).How might this shift occur? It actually consists of two separateprocesses—disidentification from the familiar self, and identifica-tion with the authentic self.

First, a patient must come into a particular relation to thesoul’s organization as the familiar self, so that disidentificationfrom this familiar self might be possible. This requires an abilityon the patient’s part to both separate from but also inquire intoher experience so she is not “caught” in it, dwelling in it, or iden-tified with it. This is the familiar “analytic split in the ego.” But thisalone leads to an analysis that is dry and overintellectualized. Thepatient must also be able to fully inhabit her experience. But howcan a person fully inhabit her experience and at the same timedisidentify from it?

What is required here is a particular form of consciousnessthat we might call meditative awareness—the ability to deeplyexperience, but also simultaneously step back from, the contentsof our experience. This form of consciousness actually requiresthe particular mental operation of being able to split our atten-tion, as it were, into two beams—one to consciously live theexperience of the moment, the other to simultaneously investigateit. The term “meditative” awareness is appropriate here, becausethe basic form of Buddhist meditation, known as mindfulnessmeditation, teaches precisely this technique.

Of course this is a capacity that patients often develop in thecourse of psychoanalysis without paying any particular attentionto spirituality. My point is that paying attention to this processin more precise detail can make our analytic technique moreeffective.

At the same time it is certainly true that, since the actualmicro-process of simultaneously feeling and letting go of an expe-rience is a technique that has been practiced in the East forthousands of years through meditation, it can also be helpful forthe patient, and analyst, to learn to meditate. (Whether the analyst

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should actually take the next step of encouraging her patientsto meditate is a complex technical issue that deserves furtherexploration.)

Healing in Spiritual Psychoanalysis—Step 2: Identifying with theAuthentic Self

What about the second part of the process, identifying with theauthentic self? This comes about primarily through the presenceof a particular field of experience between patient and analyst thatI propose to call communion.

Communion

Since Freud, our understanding of the analytic process hasexpanded and matured.

We started from Freud’s clear definition of psychoanalyticaction—making the unconscious conscious, or “where id was,ego shall be.” Trauma and dissociation studies have taught us tointegrate vertical splits in the psyche. Interpersonal psychoanaly-sis, intersubjectivity, and relational psychoanalysis helped us seethat we need to conceptualize the healing process as “two-body”(Mitchell & Aron, 1999). And recent developments have furtherexpanded our view, to consider not just patient and analyst butsome third factor. This could be called the field between patientand analyst, or what Thomas Ogden has named “the analyticthird” (Ogden, 2004).

Many of us have had the experience of being with a patientin a way that feels magical. We might at a given moment findourselves surprised to be saying something, and then equallysurprised when the patient responds intensely. This then can trig-ger another statement from us, which may seem to come fromnowhere, meaning it is not necessarily calculated or premeditated.What ensues may feel like a flowing dance, where patient and ana-lyst seem to effortlessly exchange comments, or laughter, or tears,or perhaps silence, in a way that comes to take on a life and a heal-ing power all its own. These are the moments that feel like grace,and make us remember why we are analysts.

In such experiences, can we understand what is going on?At these times the analyst is connected to her authentic self—this

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is then transmitted to the patient. This transmission triggers thepatient’s contact with her own authentic self, in a reverberatingcurrent of realness. This midwife-like experience could also bedescribed as the flame of the analyst’s authentic self touching thehidden spark of the patient’s authentic self and igniting that sparkinto a flame. This is the existential analyst Binswanger’s descrip-tion of the therapeutic process: “to make or rekindle that divine‘spark’ in the patient which only true communication from exis-tence to existence can bring forth, and which alone possesses,with its light and warmth, the fundamental power that makes anytherapy work” (May et al., 1958).

Interestingly, this process is well known in the great spiritualtraditions, where it is traditionally given the name of “transmis-sion” or “initiation.” In Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, and in theVedanta Yoga tradition of India, for example, when the spiritualstudent is ready, her teacher energetically transmits the wisdomthat assists the student in taking the next step toward a fullerspiritual maturation.

For our purposes, I would like to propose the term “com-munion” for this field of reverberating authenticity. I use thisterm to clearly distinguish it from another, apparently similarbut in actuality radically different experience, the experienceof mother–child symbiotic merger. Here again we are helpedby Wilber’s incisive distinction between pre-rational and trans-personal experience. Phenomenologically—that is, experiencedfrom the inside—we would never actually confuse the experiencewe have as analysts with what we imagine a baby experiences withher mother. The experience we have as analysts obviously has somuch richness, complexity, and multiple levels of experience andmeaning that it could never be confused with total regressive expe-rience, although it may share certain characteristics with it. Whatcharacterizes the baby’s experience, in so far as we can determine,is the experience of merger with her mother into a sense of totalexperiential unity. But what characterizes the adult experience ofthe analyst and the patient is precisely this experience of mergercoexisting with the rich and complex experience of being separateand autonomous adults.

So communion—the shared experience of authenticity—ismarked by the simultaneous experience of intimate connectionand separate autonomy, which is what provides its richness. This

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process is described by May as follows: “Knowing another being,like loving him, involves a kind of union, a dialectical participa-tion with the other” (May et al., 1958). This is Martin Buber’sfamous “I-Thou” relationship (Buber, 1923/1958). Almaas refersto this as the experience of a dialectical field of mutual per-sonal authenticity (Almaas, 2004). Or as Karasu puts it, “authenticcommunication is neither verbal nor silent—it is an irreduciblecommunion” (Karasu, 2001).

Similar ideas have recently emerged within the mainstreampsychoanalytic community. Darlene Ehrenberg’s concept of “theintimate edge” comes to mind, as does Stern’s understandingof “now moments” and “moments of meeting.” Lichtenberg andcolleagues explore a similar approach in the context of inter-subjective understanding (Ehrenberg, 1992; Stern et al., 1998;Stern, 2004; Lichtenberg, Lachmann, & Fosshage, 2002). Frankhas also investigated this area by suggesting the terms “the per-sonal relationship” or the “new relationship” to more rigorouslydefine, within a relational psychoanalytic framework, an aspectof the psychoanalytic relationship that may have elements simi-lar to what I am suggesting we call communion (Frank, 2005).Frank has recently gone further and addressed an additionalimportant issue—the alteration in our experience of ourselves asanalysts—that this new perspective may entail:

The act of representing ourselves to ourselves as self-contained and as hav-ing an independent, static existence apart from all context—like the falseconfidence that we know ourselves best and patients’ perceptions of usare mere transference distortions—form tempting proclivities reinforcedby the residual influence of the monadic psychoanalytic model (Frank,2012).

Historically, within psychoanalysis there has been continualdebate about the relative importance of what have traditionallybeen called the transference relationship, the working alliance,and the real relationship. Frank has persuasively objected to thetraditional overarching phrase “the real relationship” to concep-tualize this level of mutual analytic participation, although as hepoints out, it may be that at this time in the theoretical analytic dia-logue, the term “real relationship” may be too deeply entrenchedin the minds of all of us to be displaced even by terms that philo-sophically and clinically may make more sense (Frank, 2005).

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In any case, to make explicit what has been implied in this dis-cussion, whether we term it the real relationship, the dialecticalrelationship, the personal or new relationship, or communion, itis the point of view of spiritual psychoanalysis that it is this relation-ship of reverberating authenticity that is ultimately preeminent inpower to heal. This distinguishes this model from traditional andcurrent psychoanalytic thinking in a very important way.

Technique in Spiritual Psychoanalysis

The first point is for the analyst to impose on himself a positive disciplineof eschewing memory and desire. I do not mean that forgetting is enough;what is required is a positive act of refraining from memory and desire.(W. R. Bion, 1970/1977)

There are two interesting and somewhat paradoxical state-ments to make about technique in spiritual psychoanalysis. Thefirst is that the basic “technique” is “no technique,” because any“technique” tends to objectify the patient—the direct oppositeof the spiritual psychoanalytic approach. The second statementis that if we do in fact want to talk about the “technique” of theanalyst, the analyst’s most important technical tool is her psy-chological and spiritual maturity. The most important action aspiritual analyst can take to improve her professional function-ing is to maximize her personal growth. This may recall Freud’swell-known statement, made in Analysis Terminable and Interminable(Freud, 1937, pp. 247, 249):

It cannot be disputed that analysts in their own personalities have notinvariably come up to the standard of psychical normality to which theywish to educate their patients . . . . Every analyst should periodically—atintervals of five years or so—submit himself to analysis once more, withoutfeeling ashamed of taking this step.

Presence

To say that the basic technique of spiritual psychoanalysis is “notechnique” is to say that the primary job of the analyst is simply to“be” with her patient. Another way that this point has been madeis to say that the most important aspect of the analyst is what hasbeen called her “presence.”

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To say that the primary task of the analyst is to be presentis not to make some vague New Age–type statement about try-ing to be genuine or authentic. What I am calling presence hascertain definite attributes. Elucidating these attributes makes pres-ence not just a mushy concept, but gives specificity to our practiceas analysts, and guides us in the faculties we might choose tocultivate.

First, in an overall sense, presence in the analyst is the capac-ity to fully inhabit her own authentic self by being completelywith her own and her patient’s experience, rejecting nothing,and without in any way trying to fix her patient, turn her intoan object, judge her, reject any aspect of her experience, or useher for any narcissistic need. This is the orientation that will mostfacilitate the patient’s capacity for meditative awareness and willmost easily facilitate whatever communion, and consequent con-tact with the authentic self, is possible. “The starting point forpsychoanalytic work is the analyst’s capacity to be at one with ‘O’(spiritual reality)” (Eigen, 1991/1999).

This approach is familiar to us as psychoanalysts. Advocatedby Freud in his famous concept of free-floating attention, it wasalso explored by Heidegger in Being and Time. The psychoan-alyst Chessick explicates Heidegger’s concept: “Being can onlyappear when we retire from active investigation and achievea state of Gelassenheit—serenity, composure, release, a state ofrelaxation, a disposition that ‘lets be.’ This is remarkably sim-ilar to Bion’s advice to approach therapeutic sessions withoutmemory, desire, or understanding” (Chessick, 2010). Within thecurrent psychoanalytic framework, this aspect of psychoanalytictechnique, if we may call it that, is sometimes referred to as“authenticity” (Frank, 1997).

As we explore the experience of presence in the analyst, wecan further elucidate two of its critical attributes—the capacity to“not know” and the capacity to “not fix.”

The Capacity to “Not Know”

The first of these attributes is a particular thinking processthat occurs within the analyst while in the experience of pres-ence. This is not the usual linear, left-brain scientific thinkingthat we refer to by the word “thinking” and that is part of the

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functioning of the familiar self. Rather, this is a new way ofthinking—“meditative awareness,” or what Heidegger referred toas “meditative thinking”:

There are then two kinds of thinking, each justified and needed in itsown way: calculative thinking and meditative thinking. Calculative think-ing may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way ofthinking . . . . Then man would have denied and thrown away his ownspecial nature—that he is a meditative being . . . . [with] openness to themystery (Heidegger, 1966).

The ability to “not know” is how this capacity is oftendescribed in artistic and spiritual enterprises. This was called“beginner’s mind” by the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki Roshi(Suzuki, 2006). And it is the famous “negative capability” that,writing about what makes for a great artist, John Keats described200 years ago: “When a man is capable of being in uncertainties,mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and rea-son” (Bion, 1970/1977). The composer John Cage referred to thisin saying, “Before I start to work I believe I understand something;once I start it becomes clear to me I know nothing.” A similarpoint has been made by Hoffman when he explores the technicalimplications of his “social-constructivist” paradigm. “The result-ing special kind of ‘uncertainty’ frees analysts to ‘be themselves’”(Hoffman, 1998).

The idea here is that as analysts, we want to tap into theintuitive resources of the authentic self, which are far richer anddeeper than those of the familiar self. The way to do this is tosuspend, as far as possible, functioning from the familiar self andfunctioning from our usual mode of thinking. “What the psycho-analyst must know: how to ignore what he knows” (Lacan, 1955/

2002).

“Not Fixing”

A second aspect of the analyst’s presence is the capacity to nottake the patient as an object, as a substance, that is to be repairedor “fixed.” This was already referred to in 1943 when Sartrewarned us to not consider a human being as “a substance” (Sartre(1943/1956). Not taking another person to be an object is relatedto the Indian yoga concept of karma yoga, or the capacity to fully

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commit ourselves to a task without engaging in a narcissistic needfor its success. The most famous statement of this occurs in theIndian classic The Bhagavad-Gita (The Lord’s Song), said to be thesecond most widely read book on the planet (Mitchell, 2000).

This was also Bion’s analytic position: “Bion came to theview that desire for the cure of the patient was an obstacle to theanalysis” (Symington, 1996). What Bion is here warning us againstis the almost universal tendency among us as analysts to objectifyor dehumanize our patients to (consciously or unconsciously)gratify our own narcissistic needs for self-esteem, power, or money.

In spiritual psychoanalysis, the emphasis is on “no tech-nique,” presence, not-knowing, and not-fixing, which all serve asan orienting framework. It addition, it can be useful to furtherdescribe certain specific approaches that differentiate the spiri-tual approach from traditional and current analytic approaches.(For a very sophisticated modern understanding of psychoanalytictechnique, see Lichtenberg, Lachmann, & Fosshage, 1996.) Theseadditional spiritual approaches are: working with what I wouldterm the three levels of the soul; working deeply with the body;and a specific approach to working with the superego.

Working with the Three Levels of the Soul

In traditional psychoanalytic work, to the extent that we focus onthe intrapsychic experience of our patients, we tend to start, as wesay, “where the patient is.” This usually involves starting “from thesurface,” or the patient’s affective state, and dealing with defensivestructures or resistances. We attempt to understand and accept thefunctioning of resistances, which often leads to their relaxation.This is the first level of our analytic work.

What then may arise is a deeper level of experience, at firstdisturbing, against which the original defensive structures wereconstructed. So the patient may experience grief, pain, rage, hate,hurt, joy, pride, or sexuality. These can be precisely named, andthis naming can be accompanied by insight, by a sense in thepatient of relaxation, and by a sense between analyst and patientof something important having been accomplished. This is thesecond level.

These first two levels of the soul are part of what I am call-ing the familiar self. At this traditional ending place in a session,

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spiritual psychoanalysis continues. What can be discovered is thatunderneath or beside this second layer of the soul lies a third layer,and that is the layer of the (at first) unconscious or dissociatedauthentic self.

This is not just a matter of the patient being helped toexperience a deeper emotional state. Emotional states are char-acterized by their transiency. What can begin to reveal itself, withthe right kind of guidance, is the authentic self—deep and lastingexperiences of compassion, love, power, strength, intuition, andwill, and also experiences of universal love, unity, universal order,and a deeper perception of reality. This is the third level ofspiritual psychoanalytic work, and it is already present in ourpatients as a potential, waiting to be released through the analyst’sfacilitation of disidentification from the familiar self and throughthe reciprocal analytic experience of communion.

Working with the Body

The capacity of a patient to access this deeper level of spiritualexperience—aspects of the authentic self—is greatly enhancedwhen we as analysts pay careful attention to the direct somaticexperience of our patients. This involves the integration intopsychoanalysis of what today have come to be called “activetechniques.” (For a thoughtful and sophisticated exposition ofintegrating such techniques into psychoanalysis, see Frank, 1999.)The main approach here is similar to the Focusing work of EugeneGendlin, who stays directly with the felt sense of the patient untilsomething deeper reveals itself (Gendlin, 1996). It is also simi-lar to Gestalt therapy and to many of what today are called “bodytherapies,” such as traditional Reichian analysis, bio-energetic orcore energetic therapy, and other similar approaches (Reich,1942/1973; Perls, Hefferline, & Goodman, 1951; Lowen, 1976;Pierrakos, 1990). What these body therapies all have in commonis a direct focus on immediate physical experience as a gateway tothe authentic self.

Certain psychotherapy modalities unfamiliar to mostanalysts—EMDR (Shapiro, 2002), Somatic Experiencing (Levine,1997), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Ogden et al., 2006) andCoherence Therapy (Ecker & Hulley, 2007), among others—arecentrally concerned with the “embodied self,” and while they are

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not psychoanalytic per se, they can be advantageously integratedin ways that engage the individual’s biology in analysis (Frank,1999).

Working with the Superego

Finally I want to mention the superego. Here spiritual psychoanal-ysis strongly differs from the traditional analytic approach. In ourusual way of thinking, of course, the superego is considered to be aprecipitate of the internalized object representations of parentingfigures and of society. It serves as a lifelong and necessary internalethical gyroscope that orients our adult interpersonal and socialbehavior.

From the point of view of spiritual psychoanalysis, however,this structure is superfluous in a mature human being. What wehave been calling the authentic self contains its own inherentmoral guidelines that are sufficient for the development of anethically mature person. There is no need for an internalizedparental imago that criticizes, or even a need for one that praises.The superego keeps our patients trapped in a sophisticated ver-sion of a childhood familiar self, and acts as a barrier to furthergrowth. Therefore in spiritual psychoanalysis we employ a num-ber of techniques to help the patient weaken the hold of andeventually abolish the presence of the superego.

This seemingly nonanalytic clinical position has support froman early analyst who has come to be recognized as a analytic pio-neer: “Only a complete dissolution of the superego can bringabout a radical cure. Successes that consist in the substitution ofone superego for another must be regarded as transference suc-cesses; they fail to attain the final aim of therapy, the dissolutionof the transference” (Ferenczi, 1928/1980).

Conclusion

In presenting an outline for a possible spiritual psychoanalysis,we have reviewed the nature of spirituality and our resistancesto it; the history of spiritually oriented psychoanalysis and psy-chotherapy; a spiritual theory of soul, self, and identity; thespiritual analytic process; and new possibilities for analytic tech-nique. My emphasis has been on incorporating the insights of the

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great spiritual traditions into contemporary psychoanalysis, not toreplace what we already know, but to enable us to do even betterwhat we already know how to do well.

I am suggesting five major innovations. First, I am suggestingthat we open ourselves to the existence of the spiritual, a realm ofexperience known for thousands of years that is different from theordinary physical, mental, and emotional, and that is character-ized by a sense of greater “realness” and meaning than our usualexperience of reality. Second, I am proposing the concept of acore spiritual self—the authentic self—that is distinct from ourusual sense of familiar self, and that is more deeply unconsciousor dissociated than what we normally think of as the unconscious.

Third, I am putting forth the idea that the capacity to connectwith, and ultimately identify with, this authentic self is what consti-tutes psychological and spiritual maturity, and constitutes analyticcure. Fourth, I am suggesting that analytic cure occurs primar-ily through the real relationship with the analyst, and specificallythrough a process of communion, a reverberating authenticitybetween analyst and patient, whereby the analyst’s experience ofher authentic self is transmitted to the patient through an ener-getic field. And fifth, I am proposing the idea that, in addition,the analyst’s presence, as manifested through not knowing andnot fixing, along with deep attention to the patient’s bodily expe-rience and with a vigorous attempt to eliminate the superego, mayenable the patient to achieve a deeper level of maturity than wesometimes see in our everyday clinical work.

Many analysts reading these thoughts may reflect that muchof this does not seem new. I would not disagree. I believe thatskilled psychoanalysts for decades have been familiar with, andpracticing, much of what I am suggesting, using different lan-guages or systems of belief, but not labeling it “spiritual.” My pointis simply that making more explicit certain theoretical and techni-cal ideas, using the orientation that I have been calling spiritual,may help our patients and ourselves more deeply develop theseskills that have the capacity to facilitate the analytic process.

The capacity to do spiritual psychoanalysis, which funda-mentally depends on the capacity of the analyst to identify withher authentic self, is a capacity that can be developed. Greaterintuition for the realm of spiritual experience, which is one ofthe aspects of the analyst’s authentic self, can be trained. Other

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capacities of the authentic self—for example, the capacities to bepresent, to not know, to not “fix,” to work directly with physicalexperience and with the superego—are also capacities that can bedeveloped in the analyst through her own work on disidentifyingfrom the familiar self and identifying with the deeper, authenticself. This is the path of the spiritual psychoanalyst.

Although it was some 37 years ago, I can still remember myshock at hearing from one of my psychoanalytic teachers at AlbertEinstein College of Medicine the idea that the ultimate provinceof psychoanalysis was not the cure of the patient but rather respectfor the truth (Kovel, 1974). It has taken me many decades ofexperience on both sides of the couch and chair to realize howprofoundly true this is. As analysts, when we privilege “fixing” ourpatients over exploring the truth of the psyche we show the ulti-mate disrespect to reality; we become narcissistically attached tooutcome and to the familiar self in a way that blocks our deepestwisdom; and we depart from Erikson’s profound insight that thefoundation of human life is the development of basic trust.

In what many regard as his final theoretical statement, Freudsaid, “We must not forget that the relationship between analystand patient is based on a love of truth” (Freud, 1937). This ulti-mate respect for the truth of the self and of reality—the hallmarkof psychoanalysis—is also the hallmark of the great spiritual tradi-tions. It is this shared commitment to the truth above all else thatat the end of the day makes possible a spiritual psychoanalysis.

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Contributor

Kenneth Porter, MD, is a spiritual psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He isa teacher of Buddhism and Buddhist meditation, a student of KundaliniScience (Swami Chandrasekharanand Saraswati), and a teacher-in-trainingin the Diamond Approach of A. H. Almaas, a spiritual path that integratesWestern depth psychology and Eastern mysticism. He is Past-President ofthe Association for Spirituality and Psychotherapy, and is a teacher andauthor in the field of psychoanalytic group psychotherapy.

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porter - can be spiritual psychonalisis

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